In Roman Mythology, The God Jupiter Drew A Veil Of Clouds Around Himself To Hide His Mischief. It Was

Is it safe to look at the eclipse if it isn't fully covered by the sun? Say 75%

Not without proper eye wear. There will still be too much light that could burn your eyes. But you can have a ton of fun viewing the Sun using a https://eclipse.aas.org/eye-safety/projection. In fact, there is a sunspot that is now on the Sun that you should be able to see using this indirect method! 

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s flight harness is transferred from the mock-up structure to the spacecraft flight structure.

Your Body is Wired Like a NASA Space Telescope. Sort Of.

If our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope were alive, its nervous system would be the intricate wiring, or “harness,” that helps different parts of the observatory communicate with one another. Just like the human body sends information through nerves to function, Roman will send commands through this special harness to help achieve its mission: answering longstanding questions about dark energy, dark matter, and exoplanets, among other mind-bending cosmic queries. 

Roman’s harness weighs around 1,000 pounds and is made of about 32,000 wires and 900 connectors. If those parts were laid out end-to-end, they would be 45 miles long from start to finish. Coincidentally, the human body’s nerves would span the same distance if lined up. That’s far enough to reach nearly three-fourths of the way to space, twice as far as a marathon, or eight times taller than Mount Everest! 

An aerial view of the harness technicians working to secure Roman’s harness to the spacecraft flight structure.

Over a span of two years, 11 technicians spent time at the workbench and perched on ladders, cutting wire to length, carefully cleaning each component, and repeatedly connecting everything together.  

Space is usually freezing cold, but spacecraft that are in direct sunlight can get incredibly hot. Roman’s harness went through the Space Environment Simulator – a massive thermal vacuum chamber – to expose the components to the temperatures they’ll experience in space. Technicians “baked” vapors out of the harness to make sure they won’t cause problems later in orbit.  

Technicians work to secure Roman’s harness to the interior of the spacecraft flight structure. They are standing in the portion of the spacecraft bus where the propellant tanks will be mounted.  

The next step is for engineers to weave the harness through the flight structure in Goddard’s big clean room, a space almost perfectly free of dust and other particles. This process will be ongoing until most of the spacecraft components are assembled. The Roman Space Telescope is set to launch by May 2027. 

Learn more about the exciting science this mission will investigate on X and Facebook. 

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Our Eyes in the Sky See Toxic Waters

Warm summer temperatures often lead to dangerous blooms of phytoplankton in lakes, reservoirs and along our coastlines. These toxin-containing aquatic organisms can sicken people and pets, contaminate drinking water, and force closures at boating and swimming sites.

In this image, a severe bloom of toxic blue-green algae is spreading across the western half of Lake Erie. Taken on July 30, 2019 by the Operational Land Imager on our Landsat 8 satellite, this image shows green patches where the bloom was most dense and where toxicity levels were unsafe for recreational activities. Around the time of this image, the bloom covered about 300 square miles of Lake Erie’s surface, roughly the size of New York City. By August 13, the bloom had doubled to more than 620 square miles. That’s eight times the size of Cleveland. 

The dominant organism—a Microcystis cyanobacteria—produces the toxin microcystin, can cause liver damage, numbness, dizziness, and vomiting. On July 29, 2019, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported unsafe toxin concentrations in Lake Erie and have since advised people (and their pets) to stay away from areas where scum is forming on the water surface.

You can stay informed about harmful algal blooms using a new mobile app that will send you alerts on potentially harmful algal blooms in your area. Called CyAN, it's based on NASA satellite data of the color changes in lakes and other bodies of water. It serves as our eye-in-the-sky early warning system, alerting the public and local officials to when dangerous waters may be in bloom.

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Help Explore Your Own Solar Neighborhood

We’re always making amazing discoveries about the farthest reaches of our universe, but there’s also plenty of unexplored territory much closer to home.

Our “Backyard Worlds: Planet 9” is a citizen science project that asks curious people like you — yes, you there! — to help us spot objects in the area around our own solar system like brown dwarfs. You could even help us figure out if our solar system hosts a mysterious Planet 9!

In 2009, we launched the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). Infrared radiation is a form of light that humans can’t see, but WISE could. It scans the sky for infrared light, looking for galaxies, stars and asteroids. Later on, scientists started using it to search for near-Earth objects (NEOWISE) like comets and asteroids.

These searches have already turned up so much data that researchers have trouble hunting through all of it. They can’t do it on their own. That’s why we asked everyone to chip in. If you join Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, you’ll learn how to look at noisy images of space and spot previously unidentified objects. 

You’ll figure out how to tell the difference between real objects, like planets and stars, and artifacts. Artifacts are blurry blobs of light that got scattered around in WISE’s instruments while it was looking at the sky. These “optical ghosts” sometimes look like real objects.

Why can’t we use computers to do this, you ask? Well, computers are good at lots of things, like crunching numbers. But when it comes to recognizing when something’s a ghostly artifact and when it’s a real object, humans beat software all the time. After some practice, you’ll be able to recognize which objects are real and which aren’t just by watching them move!

One of the things our citizen scientists look for are brown dwarfs, which are balls of gas too big to be planets and too small to be stars. These objects are some of our nearest neighbors, and scientists think there’s probably a bunch of them floating around nearby, we just haven’t been able to find all of them yet. 

But since Backyard Worlds launched on February 15, 2016, our volunteers have spotted 432 candidate brown dwarfs. We’ve been able to follow up 20 of these with ground-based telescopes so far, and 17 have turned out to be real!

Image Credit: Ryan Trainor, Franklin and Marshall College

How do we know for sure that we’ve spotted actual, bona fide, authentic brown dwarfs? Well, like with any discovery in science, we followed up with more observation. Our team gets time on ground-based observatories like the InfraRed Telescope Facility in Hawaii, the Magellan Telescope in Chile (pictured above) and the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico and takes a closer look at our candidates. And sure enough, our participants found 17 brown dwarfs!

But we’re not done! There’s still lots of data to go through. In particular, we want your help looking for a potential addition to our solar system’s census: Planet 9. Some scientists think it’s circling somewhere out there past Pluto. No one has seen anything yet, but it could be you! Or drop by and contribute to our other citizen science projects like Disk Detective.

Congratulations to the citizen scientists who spotted these 17 brown dwarfs: Dan Caselden, Rosa Castro, Guillaume Colin, Sam Deen, Bob Fletcher, Sam Goodman, Les Hamlet, Khasan Mokaev, Jörg Schümann and Tamara Stajic.

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#InternationalCatDay? Try #IntergalacticCatDay. 

Check out features of our feline friends that have come to life as interstellar phenomena! 

Pictured first, the Cat’s Paw Nebula is located about 4,200-5,500 light-years from Earth – situated in our very own Milky Way Galaxy. It was named for the large, round features that create the impression of a feline footprint and was captured by our Spitzer Space Telescope. After gas and dust inside the nebula collapse to form stars, the stars may in turn heat up the pressurized gas surrounding them. This process causes the gas to expand into space and form the bright red bubbles you see. The green areas show places where radiation from hot stars collided with large molecules called "polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons," causing them to fluoresce.

Next, you’ll find the Cat’s Eye Nebula. Residing 3,000 light-years from Earth, the Cat’s Eye represents a brief, yet glorious, phase in the life of a sun-like star. This nebula's dying central star may have produced the simple, outer pattern of dusty concentric shells by shrugging off outer layers in a series of regular convulsions. To create this view, Hubble Space Telescope archival image data have been reprocessed. Compared to well-known Hubble pictures, the alternative processing strives to sharpen and improve the visibility of details in light and dark areas of the nebula and also applies a more complex color palette. Gazing into the Cat's Eye, astronomers may well be seeing the fate of our sun, destined to enter its own planetary nebula phase of evolution ... in about 5 billion years.

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Why Won’t Our Parker Solar Probe Melt?

This summer, our Parker Solar Probe will launch to travel closer to the Sun than any mission before it, right into the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona.

The environment in the corona is unimaginably hot: The spacecraft will travel through material with temperatures greater than 3 million degrees Fahrenheit. 

So…why won’t it melt? 

The Difference Between Heat and Temperature

Parker Solar Probe was designed from the ground up to keep its instruments safe and cool, but the nature of the corona itself also helps. The key lies in the difference between heat and temperature.

Temperature measures how fast particles are moving, while heat is the total amount of energy that they transfer. The corona is an incredibly thin and tenuous part of the Sun, and there are very few particles there to transfer energy – so while the particles are moving fast (high temperature), they don't actually transfer much energy to the spacecraft (low heat).

It's like the difference between putting your hand in a hot oven versus putting it in a pot of boiling water (don’t try this at home!). In the air of the oven, your hand doesn't get nearly as hot as it would in the much denser water of the boiling pot. 

So even though Parker Solar Probe travels through a region with temperatures of several million degrees, the surface of its heat shield will reach only about 2,500 F.

The Heat Shield

Of course, thousands of degrees Fahrenheit is still way too hot for scientific instruments. (For comparison, lava from volcano eruptions can be anywhere between 1,300 to 2,200 F.) 

To withstand that heat, Parker Solar Probe is outfitted with a cutting-edge heat shield, called the Thermal Protection System. This heat shield is made of a carbon composite foam sandwiched between two carbon plates. The Sun-facing side is covered with a specially-developed white ceramic coating, applied as a plasma spray, to reflect as much heat as possible.

The heat shield is so good at its job that even though the Sun-facing side of the shield will be at 2,500 F, the instruments in its shadow will remain at a balmy 85 F.

Parker Solar Probe Keeps its Cool

Several other designs on the spacecraft help Parker Solar Probe beat the heat. 

Parker Solar Probe is not only studying the Sun – it's also powered by it. But even though most of the surface area of its solar arrays can be retracted behind the heat shield, even that small exposed segment would quickly make them overheat while at the Sun.  

To keep things cool, Parker Solar Probe circulates a single gallon of water through its solar arrays. The water absorbs heat as it passes behind the arrays, then radiates that heat out into space as it flows into the spacecraft's radiator. 

It's also important for Parker Solar Probe to be able to think on its feet, since it takes about eight minutes for information to travel between Earth and the Sun. If we had to control the spacecraft from Earth, by the time we knew something went wrong, it would be too late to fix it. 

So Parker Solar Probe is smart: Along the edges of the heat shield's shadow are seven sensors. If any of these sensors detect sunlight, they alert the central computer and the spacecraft can correct its position to keep the sensors – and the rest of the instruments – safely protected behind the heat shield.

Over the course of its seven-year mission, Parker Solar Probe will make 24 orbits of our star. On each close approach to the Sun, it will sample the solar wind, study the Sun’s corona, and provide unprecedentedly close up observations from around our star – and armed with its slew of innovative technologies, we know it will keep its cool the whole time. 

Parker Solar Probe launches summer 2018 on its mission to study the Sun. Keep up with the latest on the mission at nasa.gov/solarprobe or follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

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Hi! The Sun is so bright I need shades... that are ISO 12312-2 compliant! So glad that you are all here and excited about the eclipse. I’m Alexa Halford and ready to answer your questions. 

Astronomy Night at the White House

NASA took over the White House Instagram today in honor of Astronomy Night to share some incredible views of the universe and the world around us. Check out more updates from the astronauts, scientists, and students on South Lawn.

Here’s a nighttime view of Washington, D.C. from the astronauts on the International Space Station on October 17. Can you spot the White House? 

Check out this look at our sun taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. The SDO watches the sun constantly, and it captured this image of the sun emitting a mid-level solar flare on June 25. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare can’t pass through Earth’s atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground. But when they’re intense enough, they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel.

Next up is this incredible view of Saturn’s rings, seen in ultraviolet by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Hinting at the origin of the rings and their evolution, this ultraviolet view indicates that there’s more ice toward the outer part of the rings than in the inner part.

Take a look at the millions of galaxies that populate the patch of sky known as the COSMOS field, short for Cosmic Evolution Survey. A portion of the COSMOS field is seen here by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Even the smallest dots in this image are galaxies, some up to 12 billion light-years away. The picture is a combination of infrared data from Spitzer (red) and visible-light data (blue and green) from Japan’s Subaru telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The brightest objects in the field are more than ten thousand times fainter than what you can see with the naked eye.

This incredible look at the Cat’s Eye nebula was taken from a composite of data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope. This famous object is a so-called planetary nebula that represents a phase of stellar evolution that the Sun should experience several billion years from now. When a star like the Sun begins to run out of fuel, it becomes what is known as a red giant. In this phase, a star sheds some of its outer layers, eventually leaving behind a hot core that collapses to form a dense white dwarf star. A fast wind emanating from the hot core rams into the ejected atmosphere, pushes it outward, and creates the graceful filamentary structures seen with optical telescopes.

This view of the International Space Station is a composite of nine frames that captured the ISS transiting the moon at roughly five miles per second on August 2. The International Space Station is a unique place—a convergence of science, technology, and human innovation that demonstrates new technologies and makes research breakthroughs not possible on Earth. As the third brightest object in the sky, the International Space Station is easy to see if you know when to look up. You can sign up for alerts and get information on when the International Space Station flies over you at spotthestation.nasa.gov. Thanks for following along today as NASA shared the view from astronomy night at the White House. Remember to look up and stay curious!

I am interested in learning how to grow plants in space. How can I be involved in this as a college student, or independently?

Solar System: Things to Know This Week

Our Juno mission has been exploring Jupiter since July 2016 with a special passenger on board: JunoCam, an instrument designed to take spectacular close-up color images of the largest planet in our solar system. From the raw images, citizen scientists have processed a range of beautiful photographs that highlight Jupiter's features, even turning them into works of art. Below, 10 stunning images JunoCam has given us over the past year.

1. Jovian tempest. 

This color-enhanced image of a massive, raging storm in Jupiter's northern hemisphere was captured by our Juno spacecraft during its ninth close flyby on Oct. 24, 2017. The storm is rotating counter-clockwise with a wide range of cloud altitudes, and the darker clouds are expected to be deeper in the atmosphere than the brightest clouds.

2. A southern stunner. 

Jupiter's southern hemisphere shows off in beautiful detail in this image taken on Oct. 24, 2017. 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.

3. Dreaming in color. 

Artist Mik Petter created this unique digital piece using data from the JunoCam. The art form, known as fractals, uses mathematical formulas to create an infinite variety of form, detail, color and light. The original JunoCam image was taken on July 10, 2017.

4. Jovian moon shadow. 

Jupiter's moon Amalthea casts a shadow on the gas giant planet in this image taken on Sept. 1, 2017. The elongated shape of the shadow is a result of both the location of the moon with relation to Jupiter in this image as well as the irregular shape of the moon itself.

5. 95 minutes over Jupiter. 

Once every 53 days, Juno swings close to Jupiter, speeding over its clouds. In about two hours, the spacecraft travels from a perch over Jupiter's north pole through its closest approach (perijove), then passes over the south pole on its way back out. This sequence shows 11 color-enhanced images from Perijove 8 (Sept. 1, 2017) with the south pole on the left (11th image in the sequence) and the north pole on the right (first image in the sequence).

6. Soaring high. 

This striking image of Jupiter was taken on Sept. 1, 2017 as Juno performed its eighth flyby. The spacecraft was 4,707 miles (7,576 kilometers) from the tops of the clouds of the planet at a latitude of about -17.4 degrees. Noteworthy: "Whale's Tail" and "Dan's Spot."

7. In true color. 

This true-color image offers a natural color rendition of what the Great Red Spot and surrounding areas would look like to human eyes from Juno's position. The image was taken on July 10, 2017 as the Juno spacecraft performed its seventh close flyby of Jupiter.

8. The 'face' of Jupiter. 

JunoCam images aren't just for art and science—sometimes they're created for a good chuckle. This image, processed by citizen scientist Jason Major, is titled "Jovey McJupiterface." By rotating the image 180 degrees and orienting it from south up, two white oval storms turn into eyeballs, and the "face" of Jupiter is revealed. The original image was taken by the Juno spacecraft on May 19, 2017.

9. Bands of clouds. 

This enhanced-color image of Jupiter's bands of light and dark clouds was created by citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran. Three of the white oval storms known as the "String of Pearls" are visible near the top of the image. Each of the alternating light and dark atmospheric bands in this image is wider than Earth, and each rages around Jupiter at hundreds of miles (kilometers) per hour. The lighter areas are regions where gas is rising, and the darker bands are regions where gas is sinking. Juno captured the image on May 19, 2017.

10. The edge. 

This enhanced-color image of a mysterious dark spot on Jupiter seems to reveal a Jovian "galaxy" of swirling storms. Juno captured this image on Feb. 2, 2017 and citizen scientist Roman Tkachenko enhanced the color to bring out the rich detail in the storm and surrounding clouds. Just south of the dark storm is a bright, oval-shaped storm with high, bright, white clouds, reminiscent of a swirling galaxy. As a final touch, he rotated the image 90 degrees, turning the picture into a work of art.

To learn more about the Juno mission at Jupiter, visit: www.nasa.gov/juno. 

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