At NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, an analysis of Hurricane Harvey’s tremendous rainfall was created using eight days of satellite data. NASA’s Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM or IMERG product is used to make estimates of precipitation from a combination of space-borne passive microwave sensors, including the GMI microwave sensor onboard the…
NASA Airborne Mission Returns to Africa to Study Smoke, Clouds
NASA’s P-3 research plane begins flights this month through both clouds and smoke over the South Atlantic Ocean to understand how tiny airborne particles called aerosols change the properties of clouds and how they influence the amount of incoming sunlight the clouds reflect or absorb. The Observations of Aerosols above Clouds and their Interactions, or…
An Earth-like Atmosphere May Not Survive Proxima b’s Orbit
Proxima b, an Earth-size planet right outside our solar system in the habitable zone of its star, may not be able to keep a grip on its atmosphere, leaving the surface exposed to harmful stellar radiation and reducing its potential for habitability. At only four light-years away, Proxima b is our closest known extra-solar neighbor.…
NASA Finds Moon of Saturn Has Chemical That Could Form ‘Membranes’
NASA scientists have definitively detected the chemical acrylonitrile in the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan, a place that has long intrigued scientists investigating the chemical precursors of life. On Earth, acrylonitrile, also known as vinyl cyanide, is useful in the manufacture of plastics. Under the harsh conditions of Saturn’s largest moon, this chemical is thought…
Gamma-Ray Telescopes Reveal High-Energy Trap in Our Galaxy’s Center
A combined analysis of data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.), a ground-based observatory in Namibia, suggests the center of our Milky Way contains a “trap” that concentrates some of the highest-energy cosmic rays, among the fastest particles in the galaxy. “Our results suggest that most of the…
Hubble Pushed Beyond Limits to Spot Clumps Of New Stars in Distant Galaxy
When it comes to the distant universe, even the keen vision of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope can only go so far. Teasing out finer details requires clever thinking and a little help from a cosmic alignment with a gravitational lens. By applying a new computational analysis to a galaxy magnified by a gravitational lens, astronomers…
Collapsing Star Gives Birth to a Black Hole
Astronomers have watched as a massive, dying star was likely reborn as a black hole. It took the combined power of the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), and NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes to go looking for remnants of the vanquished star, only to find that it disappeared out of sight. It went out with…
Space Weather Model Simulates Solar Storms from Nowhere
Our ever-changing sun continuously shoots solar material into space. The grandest such events are massive clouds that erupt from the sun, called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs. These solar storms often come first with some kind of warning — the bright flash of a flare, a burst of heat or a flurry of solar energetic…
NASA-Funded Sounding Rocket Will Take 1,500 Images of Sun in Five Minutes
Today, scientists will launch a sounding rocket 200 miles up into the atmosphere, where in just five minutes, it will take 1,500 images of the sun. The NASA-funded RAISE mission is designed to scrutinize split-second changes occurring near the sun’s active regions — areas of intense, complex magnetic activity that can give rise to solar…
NASA’s Webb Telescope Ghostly ‘Lights Out’ Inspection
What happens when the lights are turned out in the enormous clean room that currently houses NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope? The technicians who are inspecting the telescope and its expansive golden mirrors look like ghostly wraiths in this image as they conduct a “lights out inspection” in the Spacecraft Systems Development and Integration Facility…
Sea Ice Extent Sinks to Record Lows at Both Poles
Mars Volcano, Earth’s Dinosaurs Went Extinct About the Same Time
Relativistic Electrons Uncovered With NASA’s Van Allen Probes
Hubble Hones in on a Hypergiant’s Home
This beautiful Hubble image reveals a young super star cluster known as Westerlund 1, only 15,000 light-years away in our Milky Way neighborhood, yet home to one of the largest stars ever discovered. Stars are classified according to their spectral type, surface temperature, and luminosity. While studying and classifying the cluster’s constituent stars, astronomers discovered…
New Data from NOAA GOES-16’s Space SEISS Instrument
The new Space Environment In‐Situ Suite (SEISS) instrument onboard NOAA’s GOES-16 is working and successfully sending data back to Earth. A plot from SEISS data showed how fluxes of charged particles increased over a few minutes around the satellite on January 19, 2017. These particles are often associated with brilliant displays of aurora borealis at…
NASA Identifies Most Extreme Gamma-Ray Blazars Yet
NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has identified the farthest gamma-ray blazars, a type of galaxy whose intense emissions are powered by supersized black holes. Light from the most distant object began its journey to us when the universe was 1.4 billion years old, or nearly 10 percent of its present age. “Despite their youth, these…
NASA Study Identifies Factors Influencing African Droughts
For centuries drought has come and gone across northern sub-Saharan Africa. In recent years, water shortages have been most severe in the Sahel–a band of semi-arid land situated just south of the Sahara Desert and stretching coast-to-coast across the continent, from Senegal and Mauritania in the west to Sudan and Eritrea in the east. Drought…
NASA Study Finds Solar Storms Could Spark Soils at Moon’s Poles
Powerful solar storms can charge up the soil in frigid, permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles, and may possibly produce “sparks” that could vaporize and melt the soil, perhaps as much as meteoroid impacts, according to NASA-funded research. This alteration may become evident when analyzing future samples from these regions that could hold the…
Hubble Provides Interstellar Road Map for Voyagers’ Galactic Trek
NASA’s two Voyager spacecraft are hurtling through unexplored territory on their road trip beyond our solar system. Along the way, they are measuring the interstellar medium, the mysterious environment between stars. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is providing the road map – by measuring the material along the probes’ future trajectories. Even after the Voyagers run…
A Dead Star’s Ghastly Glow
The eerie glow of a dead star, which exploded long ago as a supernova, reveals itself in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of the Crab Nebula. But don’t be fooled. The ghoulish-looking object still has a pulse. Buried at its center is the star’s tell-tale heart, which beats with rhythmic precision. The “heart” is…
Tracking Waves from Sunspots Gives New Solar Insight
While it often seems unvarying from our viewpoint on Earth, the sun is constantly changing. Material courses through not only the star itself, but throughout its expansive atmosphere. Understanding the dance of this charged gas is a key part of better understanding our sun – how it heats up its atmosphere, how it creates a…
NASA Sees Tropical Depression 22W Form
Tropical Depression 22W has formed northeast of the northern Philippines and NASA’s Aqua satellite captured a visible image of the storm. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured a visible image of Tropical Depression 22W (TD22W) on Oct. 5 at 12:35 a.m. EDT (0435 UTC). The image showed strong thunderstorms around…
Two NASA Satellites Take a Bead on Gaston’s Movements
NASA’s Fermi Mission Expands Search for Dark Matter
Dark matter, the mysterious substance that constitutes most of the material universe, remains as elusive as ever. Although experiments on the ground and in space have yet to find a trace of dark matter, the results are helping scientists rule out some of the many theoretical possibilities. Three studies published earlier this year, using six…
NASA Teams Begins Testing New-Fangled Optic
It’s an age-old astronomical truth: To resolve smaller and smaller physical details of distant celestial objects, scientists need larger and larger light-collecting mirrors. This challenge is not easily overcome given the high cost and impracticality of building and — in the case of space observatories — launching large-aperture telescopes. However, a team of scientists and…