Five morning planets, Comet Catalina passes Polaris and icy Uranus and icy Vesta meet near Valentine’s Day.
February mornings (until Feb. 20) feature Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Mars and Jupiter. The last time this five-planet dawn lineup happened was in 2005. The planets are easy to distinguish when you use the moon as your guide. Details on viewing HERE.
If you miss all five planets this month, you’ll be able to see them again in August’s sunset sky.
Last month, Comet Catalina’s curved dust tail and straight ion tail were visible in binoculars and telescopes near two galaxies that are close to the handle of the Big Dipper. Early this month, the comet nears Polaris, the North Star. It should be visible all month long for northern hemisphere observers.
There will be more opportunities to photograph Comet Catalina paired with other objects this month. It passes the faint spiral galaxy IC 342 and a pretty planetary nebula named NGC 1501 between Feb. 10 – 29. For binocular viewers, the magnitude 6 comet pairs up with a pretty string of stars, known as Kemble’s Cascade, on Feb. 24.
Finally, through binoculars, you should be able to pick out Vesta and Uranus near one another this month. You can use the moon as a guide on Feb. 12, and the cornerstone and the corner stars of Pegasus all month long.
For more information about What’s Up in the February sky, watch our monthly video HERE.
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1. The Fault in Our Mars
This image from our Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) of northern Meridiani Planum shows faults that have disrupted layered deposits. Some of the faults produced a clean break along the layers, displacing and offsetting individual beds.
Our Juno spacecraft captured this image when the spacecraft was only 11,747 miles (18,906 kilometers) from the tops of Jupiter’s clouds – that’s roughly as far as the distance between New York City and Perth, Australia. The color-enhanced image, which captures a cloud system in Jupiter’s northern hemisphere, was taken on Oct. 24, 2017, when Juno was at a latitude of 57.57 degrees (nearly three-fifths of the way from Jupiter’s equator to its north pole) and performing its ninth close flyby of the gas giant planet.
After more than 13 years at Saturn, and with its fate sealed, our Cassini spacecraft bid farewell to the Saturnian system by firing the shutters of its wide-angle camera and capturing this last, full mosaic of Saturn and its rings two days before the spacecraft’s dramatic plunge into the planet’s atmosphere on Sept. 15, 2017.
Saturn’s moon Enceladus drifts before the rings, which glow brightly in the sunlight. Beneath its icy exterior shell, Enceladus hides a global ocean of liquid water. Just visible at the moon’s south pole (at bottom here) is the plume of water ice particles and other material that constantly spews from that ocean via fractures in the ice. The bright speck to the right of Enceladus is a distant star. This image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 6, 2011.
Our Solar Dynamics Observatory came across an oddity this week that the spacecraft has rarely observed before: a dark filament encircling an active region (Oct. 29-31, 2017). Solar filaments are clouds of charged particles that float above the Sun, tethered to it by magnetic forces. They are usually elongated and uneven strands. Only a handful of times before have we seen one shaped like a circle. (The black area to the left of the brighter active region is a coronal hole, a magnetically open region of the Sun).
See Jupiter’s southern hemisphere in beautiful detail in this image taken by our Juno spacecraft. The color-enhanced view captures one of the white ovals in the “String of Pearls,” one of eight massive rotating storms at 40 degrees south latitude on the gas giant planet. The image was taken on Oct. 24, 2017, as Juno performed its ninth close flyby of Jupiter. At the time the image was taken, the spacecraft was 20,577 miles (33,115 kilometers) from the tops of the clouds of the planet.
Our Cassini spacecraft obtained this panoramic view of Saturn’s rings on Sept. 9, 2017, just minutes after it passed through the ring plane. The view looks upward at the southern face of the rings from a vantage point above Saturn’s southern hemisphere.
This sequence of images from our Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the Sun from its surface to its upper atmosphere all taken at about the same time (Oct. 27, 2017). The first shows the surface of the sun in filtered white light; the other seven images were taken in different wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light. Note that each wavelength reveals somewhat different features. They are shown in order of temperature, from the first one at about 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit (6,000 degrees Celsius) on the surface, out to about 10 million degrees in the upper atmosphere. Yes, the sun’s outer atmosphere is much, much hotter than the surface. Scientists are getting closer to solving the processes that generate this phenomenon.
This orthographic projection shows dwarf planet Ceres as seen by our Dawn spacecraft. The projection is centered on Occator Crater, home to the brightest area on Ceres. Occator is centered at 20 degrees north latitude, 239 degrees east longitude.
This image from our Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows a small portion of the floor of Coprates Chasma, a large trough within the Valles Marineris system of canyons. Although the exact sequence of events that formed Coprates Chasma is unknown, the ripples, mesas, and craters visible throughout the terrain point to a complex history involving multiple mechanisms of erosion and deposition. The main trough of Coprates Chasma ranges from 37 miles (60 kilometers) to 62 miles (100 kilometers) in width.
This spectacular image, the first released
using all four of TESS’ cameras, shows the satellite’s full field of view. It
captures parts of a dozen constellations, from Capricornus
(the Sea Goat) to Pictor
(the Painter’s Easel) — though it might be hard to find familiar constellations
among all these stars! The image even includes the Large and Small Magellanic
Clouds, our galaxy’s two largest companion galaxies.
The science community calls this image “first
light,” but don’t let that fool you — TESS has been seeing light since it
launched in April. A first light image like this is released to show off the
first science-quality image taken after a mission starts collecting science
data, highlighting a spacecraft’s capabilities.
During those first few weeks, we also got a
sneak peek of the sky through one of TESS’s four cameras. This test image
captured over 200,000 stars in just two seconds! The spacecraft was pointed
toward the constellation Centaurus when it snapped this picture. The bright
star Beta
Centauri is visible at the lower left edge, and the edge
of the Coalsack
Nebula is in the right upper corner.
After settling into orbit, scientists ran a
number of checks on TESS, including testing its ability to collect a set of
stable images over a prolonged period of time. TESS not only proved its ability
to perform this task, it also got a surprise! A comet named C/2018 N1 passed through TESS’s cameras
for about 17 hours in July.
The images show a treasure
trove of cosmic curiosities. There are some stars whose
brightness changes over time and asteroids visible as small moving white dots.
You can even see an arc of stray light from Mars, which is located outside the
image, moving across the screen.
Now that TESS has settled into orbit and has
been thoroughly tested, it’s digging into its main mission of finding planets around other stars.
How will it spot something as tiny and faint as a planet trillions of miles
away? The trick is to look at the star!
So far, most
of the exoplanets we’ve found were detected by looking
for tiny dips in the brightness of their host stars. These dips are caused by
the planet passing between us and its star – an event called a transit. Over
its first two years, TESS will stare at 200,000 of the nearest and brightest stars
in the sky to look for transits to identify stars with planets.
TESS will be building on the legacy of NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, which also used
transits to find exoplanets. TESS’s target stars are about 10 times closer than
Kepler’s, so they’ll tend to be brighter. Because they’re closer and brighter,
TESS’s target stars will be ideal candidates for follow-up studies with current
and future observatories.
TESS is challenging over 200,000 of our
stellar neighbors to a staring contest! Who knows what new amazing planets
we’ll find?
One of the greatest mysteries that life on Earth holds is, “Are we alone?”
At NASA, we are working hard to answer this question. We’re scouring the universe, hunting down planets that could potentially support life. Thanks to ground-based and space-based telescopes, including Kepler and TESS, we’ve found more than 4,000 planets outside our solar system, which are called exoplanets. Our search for new planets is ongoing — but we’re also trying to identify which of the 4,000 already discovered could be habitable.
Unfortunately, we can’t see any of these planets up close. The closest exoplanet to our solar system orbits the closest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri, which is just over 4 light years away. With today’s technology, it would take a spacecraft 75,000 years to reach this planet, known as Proxima Centauri b.
How do we investigate a planet that we can’t see in detail and can’t get to? How do we figure out if it could support life?
This is where computer models come into play. First we take the information that we DO know about a far-off planet: its size, mass and distance from its star. Scientists can infer these things by watching the light from a star dip as a planet crosses in front of it, or by measuring the gravitational tugging on a star as a planet circles it.
We put these scant physical details into equations that comprise up to a million lines of computer code. The code instructs our Discover supercomputer to use our rules of nature to simulate global climate systems. Discover is made of thousands of computers packed in racks the size of vending machines that hum in a deafening chorus of data crunching. Day and night, they spit out 7 quadrillion calculations per second — and from those calculations, we paint a picture of an alien world.
While modeling work can’t tell us if any exoplanet is habitable or not, it can tell us whether a planet is in the range of candidates to follow up with more intensive observations.
One major goal of simulating climates is to identify the most promising planets to turn to with future technology, like the James Webb Space Telescope, so that scientists can use limited and expensive telescope time most efficiently.
Additionally, these simulations are helping scientists create a catalog of potential chemical signatures that they might detect in the atmospheres of distant worlds. Having such a database to draw from will help them quickly determine the type of planet they’re looking at and decide whether to keep observing or turn their telescopes elsewhere.
We’re getting ready to start our next mission to find new worlds! The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will find thousands of planets beyond our solar system for us to study in more detail. It’s preparing to launch from our Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in Florida.
Once it launches, TESS will look for new planets that orbit bright stars relatively close to Earth. We’re expecting to find giant planets, like Jupiter, but we’re also predicting we’ll find Earth-sized planets. Most of those planets will be within 300 light-years of Earth, which will make follow-up studies easier for other observatories.
TESS will find these new exoplanets by looking for their transits. A transit is a temporary dip in a star’s brightness that happens with predictable timing when a planet crosses between us and the star. The information we get from transits can tell us about the size of the planet relative to the size of its star. We’ve found nearly 3,000 planets using the transit method, many with our Kepler space telescope. That’s over 75% of all the exoplanets we’ve found so far!
TESS will look at nearly the entire sky (about 85%) over two years. The mission divides the sky into 26 sectors. TESS will look at 13 of them in the southern sky during its first year before scanning the northern sky the year after.
What makes TESS different from the other planet-hunting missions that have come before it? The Kepler mission (yellow) looked continually at one small patch of sky, spotting dim stars and their planets that are between 300 and 3,000 light-years away. TESS (blue) will look at almost the whole sky in sections, finding bright stars and their planets that are between 30 and 300 light-years away.
TESS will also have a brand new kind of orbit (visualized below). Once it reaches its final trajectory, TESS will finish one pass around Earth every 13.7 days (blue), which is half the time it takes for the Moon (gray) to orbit. This position maximizes the amount of time TESS can stare at each sector, and the satellite will transmit its data back to us each time its orbit takes it closest to Earth (orange).
Kepler’s goal was to figure out how common Earth-size planets might be. TESS’s mission is to find exoplanets around bright, nearby stars so future missions, like our James Webb Space Telescope, and ground-based observatories can learn what they’re made of and potentially even study their atmospheres. TESS will provide a catalog of thousands of new subjects for us to learn about and explore.
Launch teams are standing down today to conduct additional Guidance Navigation and Control analysis, and teams are now working towards a targeted launch of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) on Wednesday, April 18. The TESS spacecraft is in excellent health, and remains ready for launch. TESS will launch on a Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter made history – not only as the first aircraft to perform powered, controlled flight on another world – but also for exceeding expectations, pushing the limits, and setting the stage for future NASA aerial exploration of other worlds.
Built as a technology demonstration designed to perform up to five experimental test flights over 30 days, Ingenuity performed flight operations from the Martian surface for almost three years. The helicopter ended its mission on Jan. 25, 2024, after sustaining damage to its rotor blades during its 72nd flight.
So, what did we learn from this small but mighty helicopter?
Our Milky Way galaxy is full of hundreds of billions of
worlds just waiting to be found. In 2014, scientists using data from our planet-hunting
Kepler space telescope discovered seven planets orbiting Kepler-90, a Sun-like star
located 2,500 light-years away. Now, an eighth planet has been identified in this
planetary system, making it tied with our own solar system in having the highest
number of known planets. Here’s what you need to know:
The new planet is called Kepler-90i.
Kepler-90i is a sizzling hot, rocky planet. It’s the smallest of eight planets in the Kepler-90 system. It orbits so close to its star that a “year” passes in just 14 days.
Average surface temperatures on Kepler-90i are estimated to hover around 800 degrees Fahrenheit, making it an unlikely place for life as we know it.
Its planetary system is like a scrunched up version of our solar system.
The Kepler-90 system is set up like our solar system, with the small planets located close to their star and the big planets farther away. This pattern is evidence that the system’s outer gas planets—which are about the size of Saturn and Jupiter—formed in a way similar to our own.
But the orbits are much more compact. The orbits of all eight
planets could fit within the distance of Earth’s orbit around our Sun! Sounds
crowded, but think of it this way: It would make for some great planet-hopping.
Kepler-90i was discovered using machine learning.
Most planets beyond our solar system are too far away to be imaged directly. The Kepler space telescope searches for these exoplanets—those planets orbiting stars beyond our solar system—by measuring how the brightness of a star changes when a planet transits, or crosses in front of its disk. Generally speaking, for a given star, the greater the dip in brightness, the bigger the planet!
Researchers trained a computer to learn how to identify the faint signal of transiting exoplanets in Kepler’s vast archive of deep-space data. A search for new worlds around 670 known multiple-planet systems using this machine-learning technique yielded not one, but two discoveries: Kepler-90i and Kepler-80g. The latter is part of a six-planet star system located 1,000 light-years away.
This
is just the beginning of a new way of planet hunting.
Kepler-90 is the first known star system besides our own that has eight planets, but scientists say it won’t be the last. Other planets may lurk around stars surveyed by Kepler. Next, researchers are using machine learning with sophisticated computer algorithms to search for more planets around 150,000 stars in the Kepler database.
In
the meantime, we’ll be doing more searching with telescopes.
Kepler is the most successful planet-hunting spacecraft to date, with more than 2,500 confirmed exoplanets and many more awaiting verification. Future space missions, like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), the James Webb Space Telescope and Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) will continue the search for new worlds and even tell us which ones might offer promising homes for extraterrestrial life.
Guess what?! We have a new lead for our science missions, and we’re excited to introduce him to you. Recently, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has named Thomas Zurbuchen as the new head of our organization for science missions. Let’s get to know him…
Zurbuchen was most recently a professor of space science and aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He was also the university’s founding director of the Center for Entrepreneurship in the College of Engineering.
Zurbuchen’s experience includes research in solar and heliospheric physics, experimental space research, space systems and innovation and entrepreneurship.
We asked him a few questions to see what he has in store for science at NASA…let’s take a look:
1. What is your vision for science at NASA?
Right now, I am focusing on my team and I am learning how I can help them achieve the goals we have; to design and build the missions we are currently working on. Once the presidential transition is complete, we will engage in strategic activity with that team. It has been my experience that the best ideas always come from great and diverse teams working together. I intend to do that here as well.
2. What solar system destination are you most eager for NASA to explore?
Tough question to answer. Basically, I want to go where there are answers to the most important questions. One question on my mind is the origin of extraterrestrial life. Some parts of the answer to this question can be answered at Mars, some at Europa or other moons in the outer solar system like Enceladus. Other parts of the answer is around other stars, where we have found thousands of planets…some of which are amazingly similar to Earth!
3. With raw images posted to several websites from our missions, what’s one thing you hope members of the public can help NASA do with that powerful data?
I hope that people all over the world play with the data and find new ways to explore. It’s almost like hanging out in the most amazing libraries talking about nature. Many of the books in this library have never been opened and curious minds can find true treasures in there. I know that there are over a billion data-products NASA is making available about the Earth – it’s a treasure chest!
4. In your opinion, what big science breakthrough from the past informs missions of today?
In science, everything we do builds on successes and also failures of the past. Sometimes we forget our failures or near-failures, which tend to teach us a lot about what to do and what not to do. One of my favorite stories is about the Explorer 1 mission: first they observed almost nothing, until they realized that there was so much radiation that the detectors were chocking. The Van Allen Probes is a mission that are conducting the best exploration today of these radiation belts, discovered by Explorer 1. Our exploration history is full of stories like that.
5. Behind every pretty space image is a team of scientists who analyze all the data to make the discovery happen. What do you wish the public knew about the people and work that goes into each of those pretty pictures?
I wish people knew that every picture they see, every data-set they use, is a product of a team. One of the most exhilarating facts of working in space is to be able to work in teams composed of some of the nicest and most interesting people I have ever met. There are some super-famous people I run with every time we are in the same town, others who like to play music and listen to it, and some who have been in space or climbed mountains.
6. If you were a member of the public, what mission events in the next year would you be most excited about?
The public’s lives will be directly affected by our missions in our Earth Science portfolio. Some of them are done together with NOAA, our sister agency responsible for forecasts. For example, GOES will feature a lightning detector that will enable better predictions of storms. We are also launching CYGNSS in December. This NASA mission, composed of 8 spacecraft will provide unique and high-resolution data designed to provide a deeper understanding and better prediction for hurricanes globally.
7. NASA science rewrites textbooks all the time. What do you hope the kids of tomorrow will know as facts that are merely hypothesis today?
I hope they will know about life elsewhere. They will learn how life evolves, and where there is life today.
8. NASA has explored planets within our solar system. With the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope in 2020, what do you hope we learn about distant worlds?
James Webb is going to allow us to go back in time and look at the first stars and first galaxies. This is something we have never seen – we can only guess what will happen. James Webb is going to allow us to look at many, many more planets around other stars and will allow us to start doing the kind of research that links to the question about how habitable life is there.
9. What sort of elements make for an exciting new science discovery? What do you hope is the next big discovery?
Almost always, an exciting discovery is a surprise. Sometimes, discoveries happen because we are looking for something totally different. The biggest discoveries are the ones that change everything we thought before. All of a sudden, nature wags the finger at us and says “you are wrong!” That is how you know you are up to something new.
I hope the next big discovery tells us about the origin of the 95% of the universe we don’t know enough about. We call these 95% “Dark Energy” and “Dark Matter”, but – to be honest – we really don’t know. So, we are today living in a time where we know with 100% certainty that we don’t know what makes up 95% of our universe.
10. In your opinion, why should people care about the science at NASA?
They should care because we improve and protect lives on Earth. They should also care because we make the world we live in bigger. This is because we find things out we never knew, which creates new opportunities for humankind. Some of these opportunities are near-term – they are patents, innovations, companies or great educations. But, some of them are long-term – they change how we think about life itself.
Our flying observatory, called SOFIA, carries a 100-inch telescope inside a Boeing 747SP aircraft. Scientists onboard study the life cycle of stars, planets (including the atmosphere of Mars and Jupiter), nearby planetary systems, galaxies, black holes and complex molecules in space.
AND on Oct. 5, SOFIA is going on a special flight to chase the shadow of Neptune’s moon Triton as it crosses Earth’s surface!
In case you’re wondering, SOFIA stands for: Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy.
Triton
Triton is 1,680 miles (2,700 km) across, making it the largest of the 13 moons orbiting Neptune. Unlike most large moons in our solar system, Triton orbits in the opposite direction of Neptune, called a retrograde orbit. This backward orbit leads scientists to believe that Triton formed in an area past Neptune, called the Kuiper Belt, and was pulled into its orbit around Neptune by gravity.
The Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past Neptune and Triton in 1989 and found that Triton’s atmosphere is made up of mostly nitrogen…but it has not been studied in nearly 16 years!
Occultations are Eclipse-Like Events
An occultation occurs when an object, like a planet or a moon, passes in front of a star and completely blocks the light from that star. As the object blocks the star’s light, it casts a faint shadow on Earth’s surface.
But unlike an eclipse, these shadows are not usually visible to the naked eye because the star and object are much smaller and not nearly as bright as our sun. Telescopes with special instruments can actually see these shadows and study the star’s light as it passes near and around the object – if they can be in the right place on Earth to catch the shadow.
Chasing Shadows
Scientists have been making advanced observations of Triton and a background star. They’ve calculated exactly where Triton’s faint shadow will fall on Earth! Our SOFIA team has designed a flight path that will put SOFIA (the telescope and aircraft) exactly in the center of the shadow at the precise moment that Triton and the star will align.
This is no easy feat because the shadow is moving at more than 53,000 mph while SOFIA flies at Mach 0.85 (652 mph), so we only have about two minutes to catch the shadow!! But our SOFIA team has previously harnessed the aircraft’s mobility to study Pluto from inside the center of its occultation shadow, and is ready to do it again to study Triton!
What We Learn From Inside the Shadow
From inside the shadow, our team on SOFIA will study the star’s light as it passes around and through Triton’s atmosphere. This allows us to learn more about Triton’s atmosphere, including its temperature, pressure, density and composition!
Ground-based telescopes across the United States and Europe – from Scotland to the Canary Islands – will also be studying Triton’s occultation. Even though most of these telescopes will not be in the center of the shadow, the simultaneous observations, from different locations on Earth, will give us information about how Triton’s atmosphere varies across its latitudes.
This data from across the Earth and from onboard SOFIA will help researchers understand how Triton’s atmosphere is distorted at different locations by its high winds and its strong tides!
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Thank you for joining the #CountdownToMars! The Mars Perseverance Answer Time with expert Chloe Sackier is LIVE!
Stay tuned for talks about landing a rover on Mars, Perseverance’s science goals on the Red Planet, landing a career at NASA and more. View ALL the answersHERE.