[Spacetalk] https://www.nasa.gov/index.html https://spaceflightnow.com

[Gabe Gabrielle]

Hi all,
   I hope all  is well…we start a new month with still so much uncertainty as schools in the US are open with varying degree of participation…I think it has gone reasonable well, better than I expected, as it seems most school are functioning with masks and social distancing…also all restaurants, bars, and theaters have opened with no restrictions so we will see the consequences…hoping for the best as we move forward in trying to overcome the virus.
 
 The space program is still very active…living here is always so exciting…between Space X and United Launch Alliance (ULA, Delta and Atlas) there are many launches…at least a couple a month…they never get old…beside to sign up for the #Launch America….see below

We have to remember to do our best, enjoy everything we do, believe in ourselves, and let those we care about most know (I always say this, we all need to take it to heart) …hugs & smiles... :-) :-) STAY SAFE, TAKE CARE, Love ya, Gabe
 

You can track NASA's 2020 Mars rover Perseverance on its journey to the Red Planet
By Samantha Mathewson <https://www.space.com/author/samantha-mathewson> 3 days ago
A new tool shows you Perseverance's deep-space location in real time.


The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission launched to the Red Planet on July 30, and NASA's Eyes on the Solar System tool lets you track the spacecraft as it travels through space.
(Image: © NASA/JPL-Caltech)
You can follow NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover <https://www.space.com/perseverance-mars-2020-rover.html> in real time as it makes its way to the Red Planet.   

The interactive NASA web application Eyes on the Solar System shows you where Perseverance is as the rover travels millions of miles over the next few months. The rover, which launched on July 30, is scheduled to touch down inside Mars' Jezero Crater <https://www.space.com/42486-mars-2020-rover-jezero-crater-landing-site.html> on Feb. 18, 2021.

"Eyes on the Solar System visualizes the same trajectory data that the navigation team uses to plot Perseverance's course to Mars," Fernando Abilleira, the Mars 2020 mission design and navigation manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, said in a statement <https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7732>. "If you want to follow along with us on our journey, that's the place to be."
Related: NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission in photos <https://www.space.com/nasa-mars-perseverance-rover-mission-photos.html>
Using the app, which you can find here <https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/orrery/#/sc_perseverance>, you can track the remaining distance between Perseverance and Mars at any time, view Perseverance up close and compare the spacecraft's size to that of other NASA probes, such as Juno, Voyager 1 or the Parker Solar Probe <https://www.space.com/parker-solar-probe-marathon-sun-observations.html>. You can also fly in formation with Perseverance or check the relative velocity between Earth and Mars or other objects like the dwarf planet Pluto, according to the statement. 

"With all our orbital assets circling Mars as well as Curiosity <https://www.space.com/17963-mars-curiosity.html> and InSight on its surface, there is new data and imagery coming in all the time about the Red Planet," Jon Nelson, visualization technology and applications development supervisor at JPL, said in the same statement. "Essentially, if you haven't seen Mars lately through Eyes on the Solar System, you haven't seen Mars."

After Perseverance lands, the rover will hunt for signs of habitable environments on Mars and search for signs of past microbial life. The rover is also designed to collect a series of samples <https://www.space.com/perseverance-rover-martian-meteorite-return.html> that can be returned to Earth with a future mission and carries the Mars Helicopter, named Ingenuity <https://www.space.com/nasa-powers-up-ingenuity-mars-helicopter.html>, which will be the first rotary craft to fly on another planet.

NASA, SpaceX to Launch First Commercial Crew Rotation Mission to International Space Station

 <https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/jsc2020e032979.jpg>
The SpaceX Crew-1 official crew portrait with (from left) NASA astronauts Shannon Walker, Victor Glover, Mike Hopkins, and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Soichi Noguchi.
Credits: NASA
 <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001kY5z39X5hpYptq6YWCzhB5qJ2H2KYLfzcdBR7JTo-iqAVylzx5Bxlyrdi7Y_xvEadXpJQU-vdByVRjVIkthpjB4hHCknM8aTpAfRIR4Zioh4niKzrH9tY_kefxjJcKvx7rJyg_T9j7PFXe9VkonDDpWywGnjl9UMsFRKviB9ZStzekHX1LB3aqcsrHEuHuVdEyC3cM7oyPI4eEy65twjextls6PxPPZ_xeW1FWuI125UAj_r2yN33GJyXGVsTtKh3uoaIO2vZK_sMhAkcebizA==&c=ku3yiy9U9E2QJPv-IyutjpZD3XEdc3cIahWdYuVTFQO7rgT-l_LLCA==&ch=51OHQdXJBJ0hcod0uPbNnsgBDDyzNrDBSem1_Y0c0YIm45-zi8AIAg==>
Crew-1 is Ready to “Launch America” Again
We are targeting Saturday, Oct. 31, 2020, to launch NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker and JAXA astronaut Soichi Noguchi on our SpaceX Crew-1 mission bound for the International Space Station. This is the first crew rotation mission with four astronauts flying on a commercial spacecraft and the first including an international partner, and will expand the station’s long-duration crew to seven people for the first time.

The Crew Dragon spacecraft, named "Resilience," will lift off from Launch Complex 39A at our Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The crew is scheduled for a six-month stay aboard the orbiting laboratory, returning in spring 2021.
 <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001kY5z39X5hpYptq6YWCzhB5qJ2H2KYLfzcdBR7JTo-iqAVylzx5Bxlyrdi7Y_xvEaFYzVddqdg9RZFG2-LcQY8MykfJNYfE3XknrEtENLpuQOAQkaSKO9OV8bQpNGEKkLz0LRT6W4eGJipR8tZRFA_w==&c=ku3yiy9U9E2QJPv-IyutjpZD3XEdc3cIahWdYuVTFQO7rgT-l_LLCA==&ch=51OHQdXJBJ0hcod0uPbNnsgBDDyzNrDBSem1_Y0c0YIm45-zi8AIAg==>
The Crew-1 mission is a major step for our Commercial Crew Program. Operational, long-duration commercial crew rotation missions will enable NASA to continue the important research and technology investigations taking place aboard the station. Such research benefits people on Earth and lays the groundwork for future exploration of the Moon and Mars.
Get Ready for Crew-1
 <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001kY5z39X5hpYptq6YWCzhB5qJ2H2KYLfzcdBR7JTo-iqAVylzx5Bxlyrdi7Y_xvEadXpJQU-vdByVRjVIkthpjB4hHCknM8aTpAfRIR4Zioh4niKzrH9tY_kefxjJcKvx7rJyg_T9j7PFXe9VkonDDpWywGnjl9UMsFRKviB9ZStzekHX1LB3aqcsrHEuHuVdEyC3cM7oyPI4eEy65twjextls6PxPPZ_xeW1FWuI125UAj_r2yN33GJyXGVsTtKh3uoaIO2vZK_sMhAkcebizA==&c=ku3yiy9U9E2QJPv-IyutjpZD3XEdc3cIahWdYuVTFQO7rgT-l_LLCA==&ch=51OHQdXJBJ0hcod0uPbNnsgBDDyzNrDBSem1_Y0c0YIm45-zi8AIAg==>

Volunteers wanted: NASA's Planet Patrol wants your help to find alien worlds Mike Wall <https://www.space.com/author/mike-wall> 4 days ago
You can be a planet hunter, too.



Artist's illustration of NASA's planet-hunting TESS mission.
(Image: © MIT)
You can help NASA's newest planet-hunting mission do its otherworldly work.

The space agency just launched a citizen-science project called Planet Patrol, which asks volunteers around the world to sort through images collected by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite <https://www.space.com/39939-tess-satellite-exoplanet-hunter.html> (TESS).

"Automated methods of processing TESS data sometimes fail to catch imposters that look like exoplanets <https://www.space.com/17738-exoplanets.html>," Planet Patrol project leader Veselin Kostov, a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, said in a statement. 

"The human eye is extremely good at spotting such imposters, and we need citizen scientists to help us distinguish between the lookalikes and genuine planets," Kostov said.

Related: NASA's TESS exoplanet-hunting mission in pictures <https://www.space.com/40182-nasa-tess-exoplanet-mission-images.html>
TESS launched to Earth orbit in April 2018. The spacecraft searches for alien worlds using the "transit method <https://www.space.com/20941-alien-planet-detection-techniques-countdown.html>," noticing the tiny dips in stellar brightness caused by planets crossing their host stars' faces. But such dips can have other causes, too — natural stellar variation, for example, or a transit by a companion star <https://www.space.com/22509-binary-stars.html>. 

Advertisement

The TESS team uses algorithms to analyze the satellite's huge data set and weed out false positives. But computers are far from foolproof, so the researchers have enlisted some human help as well. Citizen scientists have already been scrutinizing TESS "light curves" — graphs of stellar brightness over time — through Planet Hunters TESS <https://www.space.com/alien-planet-discoveries-tess-citizen-science.html>, a project run by the University of Oxford in England. 


What Are Black Holes?

 <https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/simulated_bh.jpg>
Sept. 8, 2020
 <https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/starsgalaxies/black_hole_description.html#> <https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/starsgalaxies/black_hole_description.html#> <https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/starsgalaxies/black_hole_description.html#> <https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/starsgalaxies/black_hole_description.html#> <https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/starsgalaxies/black_hole_description.html#>

A black hole is an astronomical object with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape it. A black hole’s “surface,” called its event horizon, defines the boundary where the velocity needed to escape exceeds the speed of light, which is the speed limit of the cosmos. Matter and radiation fall in, but they can’t get out. Two main classes of black holes <https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/objects/black_holes1.html> have been extensively observed. Stellar-mass black holes with three to dozens of times the Sun’s mass are spread throughout our Milky Way galaxy, while supermassive monsters weighing 100,000 to billions of solar masses are found in the centers of most big galaxies, ours included.

Astronomers had long suspected an in-between class called intermediate-mass black holes, weighing 100 to more than 10,000 solar masses. While a handful of candidates have been identified with indirect evidence, the most convincing example to date came on May 21, 2019, when the National Science Foundation’s <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.nsf.org_&d=DwMFaQ&c=ApwzowJNAKKw3xye91w7BE1XMRKi2LN9kiMk5Csz9Zk&r=_eHi8HfSBzQ0mtD73Br9sfd4zgXhXht2t9AfjOGNBcA&m=HRGVGgh7IIF_lz3BoCqPA0VQeTjj9Frokm4VyWdygqs&s=SbyTNblL8sqJcVefibZPAT-ki9wyVKoaUuKMs2BLbE8&e=> Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.ligo.caltech.edu_news_ligo20160211&d=DwMFaQ&c=ApwzowJNAKKw3xye91w7BE1XMRKi2LN9kiMk5Csz9Zk&r=_eHi8HfSBzQ0mtD73Br9sfd4zgXhXht2t9AfjOGNBcA&m=HRGVGgh7IIF_lz3BoCqPA0VQeTjj9Frokm4VyWdygqs&s=uxFW0yXTbFW4zCpPR-atfmKKOnpJl5URIOEkVumQ5mo&e=>, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, detected gravitational waves from a merger of two stellar-mass black holes. This event, dubbed GW190521, resulted in a black hole weighing 142 Suns. A stellar-mass black hole forms when a star with more than 20 solar masses exhausts the nuclear fuel in its core and collapses under its own weight. The collapse triggers a supernova explosion that blows off the star’s outer layers. But if the crushed core contains more than about three times the Sun’s mass, no known force can stop its collapse to a black hole. The origin of supermassive black holes is poorly understood, but we know they exist from the very earliest days of a galaxy’s lifetime. Once born, black holes can grow by accreting matter that falls into them, including gas stripped from neighboring stars and even other black holes.

In 2019, astronomers using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) <https://eventhorizontelescope.org/> — an international collaboration that networked eight ground-based radio telescopes into a single Earth-size dish — captured an image of a black hole for the first time. It appears as a dark circle silhouetted by an orbiting disk of hot, glowing matter. The supermassive black hole is located at the heart of a galaxy called M87, located about 55 million light-years away, and weighs more than 6 billion solar masses. Its event horizon extends so far it could encompass much of our solar system out to well beyond the planets.
 <https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/20190410-78m-4000x2330.jpg>
The first picture of a black hole was made using observations of the center of galaxy M87 taken by the Event Horizon Telescope. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole 6.5 billion times the Sun’s mass.
Credits: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
Another important discovery related to black holes came in 2015 when scientists first detected gravitational waves <https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/news/ligo20160211>, ripples in the fabric of space-time predicted a century earlier by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. LIGO detected the waves from an event called GW150914, where two orbiting black holes spiraled into each other and merged 1.3 billion years ago. Since then, LIGO and other facilities have observed numerous black hole mergers <https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/news/ligo20181203> via the gravitational waves they produce.  These are exciting new methods, but astronomers have been studying black holes through the various forms of light they emit for decades. Although light can’t escape a black hole’s event horizon, the enormous tidal forces in its vicinity cause nearby matter to heat up to millions of degrees and emit radio waves and X-rays. Some of the material orbiting even closer to the event horizon may be hurled out, forming jets of particles moving near the speed of light that emit radio, X-rays and gamma rays. Jets from supermassive black holes can extend hundreds of thousands of light-years into space.
 <https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/cygnus_a_vla.jpg>
Radio data from the National Science Foundation’s Very Large Array facility was used to construct this image of Cygnus A, the brightest radio source in the sky located outside our galaxy. Long, thin particle jets produced by a supermassive black hole in the galaxy’s center link to vast lobes where speeding electrons trapped by magnetic fields emit radio waves. From tip to tip, the structure spans half a million light-years.
Credits: NRAO/AUI
NASA’s Hubble <https://www.nasa.gov/content/hubble-highlights-realizing-monster-black-holes-are-everywhere>, Chandra <http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2019/black_hole/>, Swift <https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/main>, NuSTAR <https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6872>, and NICER <https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/nasa-s-nicer-mission-maps-light-echoes-of-new-black-hole> space telescopes, as well as other missions, continue to take the measure of black holes and their environments so we can learn more about these enigmatic objects and their role in the evolution of galaxies and the universe at large.
See our Black Hole Gallery <https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/Gallery/BlackHoles.html> for additional images, simulations and visualizations about black holes.
Banner image: This simulation of a supermassive black hole shows how it distorts the starry background and captures light, producing a black hole silhouettes. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center; background, ESA/Gaia/DPAC

Last Updated: Sept. 8, 2020
Editor: NASA Administrator


Hubble Captures Galactic Glamour Shot
 <https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/potw2039a.jpg>
This stunning image by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features the spiral galaxy NGC 5643 in the constellation of Lupus (the Wolf). Looking this good isn’t easy; 30 different exposures, for a total of nine hours of observation time, together with the high resolution and clarity of Hubble, were needed to produce an image of such high level of detail and beauty.

NGC 5643 is about 60 million light-years away from Earth and has been the host of a recent supernova event (not visible in this latest image). This supernova (2017cbv) was a specific type in which a white dwarf steals so much mass from a companion star that it becomes unstable and explodes. The explosion releases significant amounts of energy and lights up that part of the galaxy.

The observation was proposed by Adam Riess, who (alongside Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt) was awarded a Nobel Prize in physics in 2011 for his contributions to the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.

Text credit: ESA (European Space Agency)
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Riess et al.; acknowledgment: Mahdi Zamani

Last Updated: Oct. 2, 2020
Editor: Rob Garne


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