Quanti Di Voi Sapevano Che, Sulla Parte Anteriore Della Coscia Destra Della Tuta EMU Degli Astronauti

A month of moons 🌘🌗🌕🌓🌒

Collage delle ultime foto dalla sonda Cassini, negli ultimi passaggi ravvicinati prima del fatidico Grand Finale, previsto per settembre, dopo 20 anni di attività.

New Horizons ha ufficialmente finito la sua missione primaria! L'ultimo bit di dati ottenuti durante il fly-by del 14 luglio 2015 è stato ricevuto dalla stazione di terra della NASA, a Canberra in Australia, martedì alle 11.48 ora italiana.

Questa sonda ha collezionato più di 50 GB di dati durante il suo paesaggio ravvicinato intorno a Plutone e Caronte e li ha inviati a terra impiegando poco più di un intero anno. La velocità di downlink è stata di 2'000 bit al secondo, una minuscola frazione rispetto alle connessioni a cui siamo abituati. Ora può iniziare la lunga fase di processing dei dati completi, che per adesso sono solo lunghe catene di 0 e 1.

Gli ingegneri di missione effettueranno un'ultima data review prima di cancellare definitivamente i dati sui due hard disk presenti a bordo della sonda, in vista delle nuove osservazioni scientifiche previste per il 2019. Il primo gennaio di quell'anno, infatti, New Horizons passerà a soli 3'000 km da 2014MU69, un antico corpo celeste presente ai confini del nostro sistema solare e scoperto due anni fa dal telescopio Hubble.

Nell'immagine potete vedere una delle scoperte più fresche del team di New Horizons: possibili nuvole intorno ai rilievi montuosi di Plutone.

RIP John Glenn

Questa sequenza di immagini a colori avanzati mostra come la geometria di visualizzazione cambia velocemente per la sonda JUNO della NASA mentre si avvicina a Giove. Le immagini sono state ottenute da JunoCam.

Image Credit: NASA/SWRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt/Seán Doran

Flying to New Heights With the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission

A mission studying Earth’s magnetic field by flying four identical spacecraft is headed into new territory. 

The Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, or MMS, has been studying the magnetic field on the side of Earth facing the sun, the day side – but now we’re focusing on something else. On February 9, MMS started the three-month-long process of shifting to a new orbit. 

One key thing MMS studies is magnetic reconnection – a process that occurs when magnetic fields collide and re-align explosively into new positions. The new orbit will allow MMS to study reconnection on the night side of the Earth, farther from the sun.

Magnetic reconnection on the night side of Earth is thought to be responsible for causing the northern and southern lights.  

To study the interesting regions of Earth’s magnetic field on the night side, the four MMS spacecraft are being boosted into an orbit that takes them farther from Earth than ever before. Once it reaches its final orbit, MMS will shatter its previous Guinness World Record for highest altitude fix of a GPS.

To save on fuel, the orbit is slowly adjusted over many weeks. The boost to take each spacecraft to its final orbit will happen during the first week of April.

On April 19, each spacecraft will be boosted again to raise its closest approach to Earth, called perigee. Without this step, the spacecraft would be way too close for comfort – and would actually reenter Earth’s atmosphere next winter! 

The four MMS spacecraft usually fly really close together – only four miles between them – in a special pyramid formation called a tetrahedral, which allows us to examine the magnetic environment in three dimensions.

But during orbit adjustments, the pyramid shape is broken up to make sure the spacecraft have plenty of room to maneuver. Once MMS reaches its new orbit in May, the spacecraft will be realigned into their tetrahedral formation and ready to do more 3D magnetic science.

Learn more about MMS and find out what it’s like to fly a spacecraft.

Colonel John Glenn...a man in orbit

Un testo di scuola del 1963, in onore di John Glenn (1921-2016)

Prima immagine di OSIRIS-REx dallo spazio profondo, giunta a noi terrestri il 15 febbraio 2017, dopo cinque mesi di "crociera". Se state per dire che l'immagine è sfocata, sappiate che la sonda si trova a 673 milioni di km da Giove. - During Earth-Trojan asteroid search operations, the PolyCam imager aboard NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft captured this image of Jupiter (center) and three of its moons, Callisto (left), Io, and Ganymede. The image, which shows the bands of Jupiter, was taken at 3:34 a.m. EST, on Feb. 12, when the spacecraft was 76 million miles (122 million kilometers) from Earth and 418 million miles (673 million kilometers) from Jupiter. PolyCam is OSIRIS-REx’s longest range camera, capable of capturing images of the asteroid Bennu from a distance of two million kilometers.

This image was produced by taking two copies of the same image, adjusting the brightness of Jupiterandnbsp;separately from theandnbsp;significantly dimmer moons, and compositing them back together so that all four objects are visible in the same frame.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland provides overall mission management, systems engineering and the safety and mission assurance for OSIRIS-REx. Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, Tucson, is the principal investigator, and the University of Arizona also leads the science team and the mission’s observation planning and processing. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the spacecraft and is providing flight operations. Goddard and KinetX Aerospace are responsible for navigating the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. OSIRIS-REx is the third mission in NASA’s New Frontiers Program. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the agency’s New Frontiers Program for its Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

Credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona

OSIRIS-REx