October is a great time to try and capture an ICE GIANT. Now, these aren't mythical creatures. They're planets — the most distant of the major planets of our solar system, Uranus and Neptune.
The four giant planets of our solar system are not created equal. The gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, are much bigger and way more massive, while the ice giants are so named because they contain a much higher amount of materials that typically form ices in the frigid depths of the outer solar system.
In October, both Uranus and Neptune are well placed in the late night sky. In fact, you can see all four giant planets in the same evening if you look for Jupiter and Saturn in the west after sunset, and then come back a couple of hours later to spot Uranus and Neptune. (Think of it as your own personal "Voyager mission." NASA's Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to have visited the ice giants so far, although scientists are eager to go back for a more detailed study.)
Not to change the topic here:
NASA studying future mission orbiting Pluto - HoustonChronicle.com
Four years after a spacecraft flew by Pluto, sending stunning images and data back to Earth, NASA has commissioned a study to explore spending even more time examining and exploring the dwarf planet.
The San Antonio-based Southwest Research Institute announced Wednesday it had received funding from NASA to study the feasibility and cost of a possible future Pluto orbiter mission.
The study will build on the success of the agency’s New Horizons mission, a space probe that launched in 2006. It was the first of its kind to get a close look at Pluto and its five moons, about 3 billion miles from Earth.
The Southwest Research Institute was part of the team that built that spacecraft, which is still exploring the farthest reaches of our solar system, having flown by Ultima Thule — a rock located a billion miles beyond Pluto that is found in the solar system’s Kuiper Belt — in January.
News | NASA's Latest Exoplanet Posters Are a Halloween Treat
Dubbed Galaxy of Horrors, the fun but informative series resulted from a collaboration of scientists and artists and was produced by NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program Office, located at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California! Videos for What ' s Up :: Skywatching Tips From NASA 2:53 What ' s Up : May 2019 Skywatching Tips from NASA YouTube!! The same program is behind the popular Exoplanet Travel Bureau poster series , which imagines humans visiting some of the thousands of known worlds outside our solar system.
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Lurking beyond our solar system, among the billions of stars and the exoplanets that orbit them, is another sort of Milky Way altogether! What's Up: Skywatching Tips from NASA – NASA Solar System ...solarsystem.nasa.gov / ...I'm Preston Dyches from NASA 's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and that's What's Up for this month. Sky Charts Sky charts presented in What's Up show a field of view of 90 degrees — that is, an area on the sky that goes from the horizon up to the top of the sky (also called the zenith).!! Our "Galaxy of Horrors" reveals the sinister science behind real worlds we've discovered in our galaxy.
Among the horrifyingly inhospitable worlds highlighted in the latest posters is HD 189733 b, a planet with an atmosphere full of silicates - the key component in sand and glass - and winds blowing at over 5,400 mph (6,700 kph). At those speeds, the silicates whipping through the air might create a perpetual storm of flying glass! What's Up: June 2019 Skywatching Tips from NASA | NASA ...solarsystem.nasa.gov /resources/2454/ whats - ...2019- skywatching - tips - from-nasa You can catch up on all of NASA 's current and future missions at nasa.gov . I'm Preston Dyches from NASA 's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and that's What's Up for this month. About Observing Jupiter. Jupiter reaches opposition on June 10. This is the yearly occurrence when Jupiter, Earth and the Sun are arranged in a straight line, with Earth in the ...!! If human or robotic explorers could travel 63 light-years from Earth to get there, they would never survive this planetary hellscape.
NASA Is Getting Serious About an Interstellar Mission | WIRED
Interstellar space exploration has long been the stuff of science fiction, a technological challenge that many engineers believe humans just aren't up to yet. But an ongoing study by a group of NASA-affiliated researchers is challenging this assumption! What's Up Video: October 2019 Skywatching Tips from NASA solarsystem.nasa.gov /.../ whats - ...skywatching - tips - from-nasa What's Up : April 2019 Skywatching from NASA This colorful spectrogram represents data collected by Cassini's Radio and Plasma Wave Science instrument as it crossed through Saturn's D ring on May 28, 2017.!! The researchers have a vision for a mission that could be built with existing technology! What's Up Video: September 2019 Skywatching Tips from NASA ...solarsystem.nasa.gov /.../ whats - ...skywatching - tips - from-nasa What's Up Video: August 2019 Skywatching Tips from NASA A large sunspot was the source of a powerful solar flare and a coronal mass ejection (Sept. 6, 2017). The flare was the largest solar flare of the last decade.!! Indeed, the group says that if their mission is selected by NASA it could fly as soon as 2030.
"This is humanity's first explicit step into interstellar space," says Pontus Brandt, a physicist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory who is working on the interstellar probe study.
The basic idea for the interstellar mission is to launch a spacecraft weighing less than 1,700 pounds on NASA's massive Space Launch System rocket, which is expected to be ready by 2021. That will get it traveling across our solar system like any other probe. To give it another boost, it will then use a gravity assist to sling the craft to speeds well over 100,000 miles per hour. The team at the Applied Physics Lab is currently considering two types of gravity assists—a "plain vanilla" assist that swings the probe around Jupiter and another that swings it around the sun.
And here's another article:
The First Cubesats to Mars Were Almost Lost Upon Arrival | Space
WASHINGTON — The first-ever interplanetary cubesats went dark just before their big moment last fall, spurring a last-minute rescue effort.
The two satellites, part of NASA's $18 million MarCO (Mars Cube One), mission were tasked primarily with demonstrating that tiny spacecraft can explore deep space. But team members also wanted the spacecraft to help relay communications from NASA's InSight Mars lander during the latter's touchdown attempt on Nov. 26, 2018.
Just a day before the landing, however, MarCO-B, "suddenly did not appear" during the remote check-in with engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), mission chief-engineer Andrew Klesh said during a presentation at the International Astronautical Congress here on Friday (Oct. 25).
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The team spent all day looking at the fault tree to fix the issue, Klesh recalled. "At 6:05 a.m. [California time] the next morning, MarCO-B shows up just on time," apparently recovering automatically from an attitude-control issue, Klesh said. He proudly told mission managers at 6:30 a.m. that both cubesats were ready to go.
News | NASA-JPL Holds Its Annual Pumpkin-Carving Contest
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