Topic: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

NASA OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft finds water on Asteroid Bennu

December 12, 2018 |

NASA Headquarters 

Washington, D.C. – Recently analyzed data from NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission has revealed water locked inside the clays that make up its scientific target, the asteroid Bennu.

During the mission’s approach phase, between mid-August and early December, the spacecraft traveled 1.4 million miles (2.2 million km) on its journey from Earth to arrive at a location 12 miles (19 km) from Bennu on December 3rd, 2018.

This mosaic image of asteroid Bennu is composed of 12 PolyCam images collected on Dec. 2 by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft from a range of 15 miles (24 km). (NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona)

«Read the rest of this article»

NASA reports Wintertime Arctic Sea Ice Growth Slows, Long-term Decline

December 10, 2018 |

Written by Maria-José Viñas
NASA’s Earth Science News Team

Washington, D.C. – New NASA research has found that increases in the rate at which Arctic sea ice grows in the winter may have partially slowed down the decline of the Arctic sea ice cover.

As temperatures in the Arctic have warmed at double the pace of the rest of the planet, the expanse of frozen seawater that blankets the Arctic Ocean and neighboring seas has shrunk and thinned over the past three decades. The end-of-summer Arctic sea ice extent has almost halved since the early 1980s. A recent NASA study found that since 1958, the Arctic sea ice cover has lost on average around two-thirds of its thickness and now 70 percent of the sea ice cap is made of seasonal ice, or ice that forms and melts within a single year.

A lone Arctic sea ice floe, observed during the Beaufort Gyre Exploration Project in October 2014. (NASA/Alek Petty)

«Read the rest of this article»

NASA OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft arrived at asteroid Bennu, Monday

December 4, 2018 |

NASA Headquarters

Washington, D.C. – After traveling through space for more than two years and over two billion kilometers, NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft arrived at its destination, asteroid Bennu, on Monday, December 3rd, 2018.

The spacecraft will spend almost a year surveying the asteroid with five scientific instruments with the goal of selecting a location that is safe and scientifically interesting to collect the sample. OSIRIS-REx will return the sample to Earth in September 2023.

This image taken by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft shows Bennu from a distance of around 50 miles (80 km). The spacecraft’s PolyCam camera obtained the thirty-six 2.2-millisecond frames over a period of four hours and 18 minutes. (NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/University of Arizona)

«Read the rest of this article»

NASA study discovers Greenhouse Gas ‘Detergent’ Recycles Itself in Atmosphere

December 3, 2018 |

NASA’s Earth Science News Team

Washington, D.C. – A simple molecule in the atmosphere that acts as a “detergent” to breakdown methane and other greenhouse gases has been found to recycle itself to maintain a steady global presence in the face of rising emissions, according to new NASA research.

Understanding its role in the atmosphere is critical for determining the lifetime of methane, a powerful contributor to climate change.

The hydroxyl (OH) radical, a molecule made up of one hydrogen atom, one oxygen atom with a free (or unpaired) electron is one of the most reactive gases in the atmosphere and regularly breaks down other gases, effectively ending their lifetimes.

Clouds over American Samoa from NASA’s Atmospheric Tomography mission in 2016.

«Read the rest of this article»

NASA’s Lucy Spacecraft to explore Jupiter Trojan Asteroids

November 30, 2018 |

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Greenbelt, MD – NASA says that a little over 4 billion years ago, the planets in our solar system coexisted with vast numbers of small rocky or icy objects orbiting the Sun. These were the last remnants of the planetesimals – the primitive building blocks that formed the planets.

Most of these leftover objects were then lost, as shifts in the orbits of the giant planets scattered them to the distant outer reaches of the solar system or beyond. But some were captured in two less-distant regions, near points where the gravitational influence of Jupiter and the Sun balance, and have remained trapped there, mostly untouched, for billions of years.

Conceptual image of the NASA Lucy mission to the Jupiter Trojan asteroids. (NASA/SwRI)

«Read the rest of this article»

NASA discovers large Meteorite Crater underneath the Ice in Greenland

November 17, 2018 |

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Greenbelt, MD – An international team of researchers, including a NASA glaciologist, has discovered a large meteorite impact crater hiding beneath more than a half-mile of ice in northwest Greenland. The crater — the first of any size found under the Greenland ice sheet — is one of the 25 largest impact craters on Earth, measuring roughly 1,000 feet deep and more than 19 miles in diameter, an area slightly larger than that inside Washington’s Capital Beltway.

The group, led by researchers from the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark worked for the past three years to verify their discovery, which they initially made in 2015 using NASA data. Their finding is published in the November 14th issue of the journal Science Advances.

Radar data from an intensive aerial survey of the Hiawatha crater in May 2016 is shown here in aqua-colored curtains. A blue arrow points to the central peak of the crater. (NASA/Cindy Starr)

«Read the rest of this article»

NASA L’Ralph instrument to study Trojan Asteroids aboard Lucy Spacecraft

November 8, 2018 |

Written by Tamsyn Brann
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Greenbelt, MD – Ralph, one of the most well-traveled NASA space explorers, has voyaged far and accomplished much: on the New Horizons mission, Ralph obtained stunning flyby images of Jupiter and its moons; this was followed by a visit to Pluto where Ralph took the first high-definition pictures of the iconic minor planet. And, in 2021, Ralph journeys with the Lucy mission to Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids.

Ralph, however, is not an impossibly accomplished astronaut — it is a scientific instrument that has made many discoveries since it first launched aboard the New Horizons spacecraft in 2006. Given a name and not an acronym, Ralph enables the study of the composition and atmospheres of celestial objects.

Illustration of the Lucy Spacecraft. (SwRI)

«Read the rest of this article»

NASA researches Ultrafast Laser Machining for Spaceflight Applications

November 5, 2018 |

Written by Lori Keesey
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Greenbelt, MD – An ultrafast laser that fires pulses of light just 100 millionths of a nanosecond in duration could potentially revolutionize the way that NASA technicians manufacture and ultimately assemble instrument components made of dissimilar materials.

A team of optical physicists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is experimenting with a femtosecond laser and has already shown that it can effectively weld glass to copper, glass to glass, and drill hair-sized pinholes in different materials.

A Goddard team is using an ultrafast laser to bond dissimilar materials, with the goal of ultimately eliminating epoxies that outgas and contaminate sensitive spacecraft components. Shown here are a few samples (from left to right): silica welded to copper; silica welded to Invar; and sapphire welded to Invar. (NASA/W. Hrybyk)

«Read the rest of this article»

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe now holds record for Closest Spacecraft to Sun

November 4, 2018 |

Written by Sarah Frazier
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Greenbelt, MD – The NASA Parker Solar Probe now holds the record for closest approach to the Sun by a human-made object. The spacecraft passed the current record of 26.55 million miles from the Sun’s surface on October 29th, 2018, at about 12:04pm CEDT, as calculated by the Parker Solar Probe team.

The previous record for closest solar approach was set by the German-American Helios 2 spacecraft in April 1976. As the NASA Parker Solar Probe mission progresses, the spacecraft will repeatedly break its own records, with a final close approach of 3.83 million miles from the Sun’s surface expected in 2024.

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe became the closest-ever spacecraft to the Sun on October 29th, 2018, when it passed within 26.55 million miles of the Sun’s surface. (NASA/JHUAPL)

«Read the rest of this article»

NASA Telescopes discover Electromagnetic waves from a Gravitational Wave Source

October 21, 2018 |

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Greenbelt, MD – About a year ago, astronomers excitedly reported the first detection of electromagnetic waves, or light, from a gravitational wave source. Now, a year later, researchers are announcing the existence of a cosmic relative to that historic event.

The discovery was made using data from telescopes including NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, and the Discovery Channel Telescope (DCT).

A distant cosmic relative to the first source that astronomers detected in both gravitational waves and light may have been discovered. This object, called GRB150101B, was first detected by identified as a gamma ray burst (GRB) by the NASA’s Fermi satellite in January 2015. (X-ray: NASA/CXC/GSFC/UMC/E. Troja et al.; Optical and infrared: NASA/STScI)

«Read the rest of this article»

© 2006-2018 Clarksville, TN Online is owned and operated by residents of Clarksville Tennessee.
» We are Hosted by Compu-Net Enterprises; In Partnership with Discover Clarksville and Discover Paris