Space&Space

25/08/2025

Built for deep space. Tested with astronauts.🚀

On this week’s , Chris Edelen, acting vehicle integration office manager for NASA’s Orion Program, discusses the spacecraft built to take the Artemis II astronauts around the Moon. https://www.nasa.gov/podcasts/houston-we-have-a-podcast/artemis-ii-the-orion-spacecraft/

25/08/2025

Curiosity MSL: Workspace sol_4641

25/08/2025

Pluto was discovered on February 18, 1930 by a young man named Clyde Tombaugh searching through images taken the previous month by the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. What he was actually looking for was “Planet X”, a theoretical fifth gas giant that some bad math had suggested must be out there perturbing Uranus’s orbit ...

Pluto was reclassified on this day in 2006 because it doesn’t clear its orbital path, one of the key criteria scientists use to define a true planet. Did Pluto deserve the downgrade? 🪐❌

Want to learn more? Give our "The Question I Always Get: Pluto" article a read here: https://www.mos.org/article/question-i-always-get-pluto!

25/08/2025

The Spinning Pulsar of the Crab Nebula

The Spinning Pulsar of the Crab Nebula (APOD: 2025 Aug 24)
Image Credit: NASA: X-ray: Chandra (CXC), Optical: Hubble (STScI), Infrared: Spitzer (JPL-Caltech)
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250824.html

Explanation: At the core of the Crab Nebula lies a city-sized, magnetized neutron star spinning 30 times a second. Known as the Crab Pulsar, it is the bright spot in the center of the gaseous swirl at the nebula's core. About twelve light-years across, the spectacular picture frames the glowing gas, cavities and swirling filaments near the Crab Nebula's center. The featured picture combines visible light from the Hubble Space Telescope in purple, X-ray light from the Chandra X-ray Observatory in blue, and infrared light from the Spitzer Space Telescope in red. Like a cosmic dynamo, the Crab Pulsar powers the emission from the nebula, driving a shock wave through surrounding material and accelerating the spiraling electrons. With more mass than the Sun and the density of an atomic nucleus, the spinning pulsar is the collapsed core of a massive star that exploded. The outer parts of the Crab Nebula are the expanding remnants of the star's component gasses. The supernova explosion was witnessed on planet Earth in the year 1054.

https://www.nasa.gov/
https://chandra.harvard.edu/
https://www.stsci.edu/hst
https://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/

Starship Asterisk* • APOD Discussion Page
https://asterisk.apod.com/discuss_apod.php?date=250824

25/08/2025

Expedition 73, your space delivery of new science and supplies was delivered on the Harmony module's forward port at 7:05 a.m. EDT today by the SpaceX Dragon.

At 7:05 a.m. EDT, the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft docked to the forward port of the International Space Station’s Harmony module.

25/08/2025

25/08/2025

For the first time ever, the public and students globally were invited to design the mission's zero gravity indicator (ZGI). ZGIs are small items that provide a visual indicator of when a spacecraft has reached microgravity ...

25/08/2025

8/25/2003, NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration's incredible Spitzer Telescope launched! The 4th & final Great Observatory, 's infrared camera peered into the cosmos for over 16 years, revealing hidden wonders from breathtaking nebulae to exoplanet discoveries. Its legacy lives on!

25/08/2025

NASA’s Great Observatories were intended to peer at the universe in different wavelengths: the Hubble Space Telescope in visible light, the Compton Gamma Ray in gamma rays, the Chandra X-ray Observatory in X-rays, and the Spitzer Space Telescope in infrared. The last of the four to be launched, Spitzer was carried into space on Aug. 25, 2003, and settled into its obit by Sept. 3. Planned for a two-and-a-half-year mission, Spitzer returned data and images for 16 years, adding to our understanding of exoplanets, the Hubble constant, black holes, and planet formation. A forerunner of the James Webb Space Telescope, Spitzer was decommissioned in 2020, but its data archive continues to supply new discoveries.

Today in the history of astronomy, an infrared view opens up the universe.

25/08/2025

The Cloverleaf Quasar is a single object whose image has been reproduced four times in a cloverleaf-like arrangement through a process known as gravitational lensing. The gravitational field of one or more foreground galaxies has bent and magnified the light from the quasar to produce the multiple images. The foreground galaxies are too faint to be seen in these images ...

Cloverleaf Quasar:
Chandra Looks Over a Cosmic Four-Leaf Clover

Cloverleaf Quasar
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Penn State/G.Chartas et al; Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

The Cloverleaf Quasar is a single object whose image has been reproduced four times in a cloverleaf-like arrangement through a process known as gravitational lensing. The gravitational field of one or more foreground galaxies has bent and magnified the light from the quasar to produce the multiple images. The foreground galaxies are too faint to be seen in these images.

One of the images (A) is brighter in both optical and X-ray light. However, the relative brightness is greater in X-ray than in optical light. Since the amount of brightening due to gravitational lensing does not vary with the wavelength, some additional effect must be magnifying the X-rays.

The increased magnification of the X-ray light can be explained if the X-rays in the Cloverleaf Quasar come from a small region around its supermassive black hole, and the optical light comes from a larger area. This could happen if a star or binary star system in one of the intervening galaxies passes in front of the region producing the X-rays. This effect is called gravitational microlensing.

The Cloverleaf X-ray and optical data indicate that the X-rays are coming from a very small region, about a hundredth of a light year or less, around the supermassive black hole. The visible light is coming from a region ten or more times larger. The angular size of these regions at a distance of 11 billion light years is tens of thousands times smaller than the smallest region that can be resolved by Chandra or the Hubble Space Telescope.

This discovery gives astronomers a new and extremely precise probe of the gas flow around the supermassive black hole that powers the quasar.

25/08/2025

ESA's mission to Jupiter is on track for its gravity-assist flyby at Venus on 31 August, following the successful resolution of a spacecraft anomaly that temporarily disrupted communication with Earth.
There will be no images captured during this flyby. Juice is designed to feel at home in the cold, dark environment at Jupiter. It is much hotter at Venus, and Juice's remote sensing instruments must remain switched off due to thermal constraints.

The European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) is on track for its gravity-assist flyby at Venus on 31 August, following the successful resolution of a spacecraft communication anomaly that temporarily severed contact with Earth.The issue, which emerged during a routine ground stat...

25/08/2025

Explanation: Sometimes even the sky surprises you. To see more stars and faint nebulosity in the Pleiades star cluster (M45), long exposures are made. Many times, less interesting items appear on the exposures that were not intended -- but later edited out. These include stuck pixels, cosmic ray hits, frames with bright clouds or Earth's Moon, airplane trails, lens flares, faint satellite trails, and even insect trails ...

The Meteor and the Star Cluster (APOD: 2025 Aug 25)
Image Credit & Copyright: Yousif Alqasimi & Essa Al Jasmi
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250825.html

Explanation: Sometimes even the sky surprises you. To see more stars and faint nebulosity in the Pleiades star cluster (M45), long exposures are made. Many times, less interesting items appear on the exposures that were not intended -- but later edited out. These include stuck pixels, cosmic ray hits, frames with bright clouds or Earth's Moon, airplane trails, lens flares, faint satellite trails, and even insect trails. Sometimes, though, something really interesting is caught by chance. That was just the case a few weeks ago in al-Ula, Saudi Arabia when a bright meteor streaked across during an hour-long exposure of the Pleiades. Along with the famous bright blue stars, less famous and less bright blue stars, and blue-reflecting dust surrounding the star cluster, the fast rock fragment created a distinctive green glow, likely due to vaporized metals.

https://www.instagram.com/alqasmyi/
https://www.instagram.com/eaqj

Starship Asterisk* • APOD Discussion Page
https://asterisk.apod.com/discuss_apod.php?date=250825