Bill Nye Said Wear A Fucking Mask!!!

Meet the Artemis Team Returning Humans to the Moon

We. Are. Going 🌙

Today, we introduced the eighteen NASA Astronauts forming the Artemis team. Together, they’ll use their diverse range of backgrounds, expertise, and experience to pave the way for humans to return to the Moon, to stay. 

Meet the heroes of the future who’ll carry us back to the Moon and beyond - the Artemis generation. 

Joe Acaba 

Fun fact: Joe is a veteran of the U.S. Peace Corps! Get to know Joe personally with this video –> Watch HERE. 

Kayla Barron

Fun fact: Kayla got her start in public service through serving in the U.S. Navy. Get to know Kayla personally with this video –> Watch HERE.

Raja Chari

Fun fact: Raja’s nickname is “Grinder,” and he comes from a test pilot background. Get to know Raja personally with this video –> Watch HERE. 

Jessica Watkins

Fun fact: Jessica is a rugby national champion winner and geologist. Get to know Jessica personally with this video –> Watch HERE. 

Matthew Dominick

Fun fact: Matthew sums himself up as a father, a husband and an explorer. Get to know Matthew personally with this video –> Watch HERE. 

Jasmin Moghbeli

Fun fact: Jasmin says she still wakes up every morning and it feels like a “pinch me moment” to think she’s actually an astronaut right now. Get to know Jasmin personally with this video –> Watch HERE. 

Victor Glover

Fun fact: Victor’s dream is to work on the surface of the Moon. Get to know Victor personally with this video –> Watch HERE. 

Jessica Meir

Fun fact: Jessica was five years old when she knew she wanted to be an astronaut. Get to know Jessica personally with this video –> Watch HERE. 

Woody Hoburg

Fun fact: Woody used to spend summers away from graduate school working search and rescue in Yosemite National Park. Get to know Woody personally with this video –> Watch HERE. 

Anne McClain

Fun fact: Anne is a West Point alumni who describes herself as an impractical dreamer. Get to know Anne personally with this video –> Watch HERE. 

Jonny Kim

Fun fact: Jonny is also a U.S. Navy SEAL with a medical degree from Harvard. Get to know Jonny personally with this video –> Watch HERE. 

Nicole Mann

Fun fact: Nicole is a U.S. Lieutenant Colonel in the Marine Corps! Get to know Nicole personally with this video –> Watch HERE. 

Kjell Lindgren

Fun fact: Kjell was a flight surgeon, a physician who takes care of astronauts, before applying to be an astronaut himself! Get to know Kjell personally with this video –> Watch HERE.

Christina Koch

Fun fact: Christina set a record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman with a total of 328 days in space. Get to know Christina personally with this video –> Watch HERE.

Frank Rubio

Fun fact: Frank was a Black Hawk helicopter pilot in the U.S. Army and family medical physician. Get to know Frank personally with this video –> Watch HERE.

Stephanie Wilson

Fun fact: Stephanie was the voice in Mission Control leading our NASA Astronauts for the all-woman spacewalk last year. Get to know Stephanie personally with this video –> Watch HERE.

Scott Tingle

Fun fact: Scott said he wanted to be an astronaut in a high school class and the students laughed – look at him now. Get to know Scott personally with this video –> Watch HERE.

Kate Rubins

Fun fact: Kate is actually IN space right now, so she will have to get her official portrait when she comes home! She is also the first person to sequence DNA in space. Get to know Kate personally with this video –> Watch HERE.  Stay up to date with our Artemis program and return to the Moon by following NASA Artemis on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

Physics meme

SHIELDS Up! NASA Rocket to Survey Our Solar System’s Windshield Apr 16, 2021

Eleven billion miles away – more than four times the distance from us to Pluto – lies the boundary of our solar system’s magnetic bubble, the heliopause. Here the Sun’s magnetic field, stretching through space like an invisible cobweb, fizzles to nothing. Interstellar space begins. “It’s really the largest boundary of its kind we can study,” said Walt Harris, space physicist at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

We still know little about what lies beyond this boundary. Fortunately, bits of interstellar space can come to us, passing right through this border and making their way into the solar system.

A new NASA mission will study light from interstellar particles that have drifted into our solar system to learn about the closest reaches of interstellar space. The mission, called the Spatial Heterodyne Interferometric Emission Line Dynamics Spectrometer, or SHIELDS, will have its first opportunity to launch aboard a suborbital rocket from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico on April 19, 2021.

Our entire solar system is adrift in a cluster of clouds, an area cleared by ancient supernova blasts. Astronomers call this region the Local Bubble, an oblong plot of space about 300 light-years long within the spiraling Orion arm of our Milky Way galaxy. It contains hundreds of stars, including our own Sun.

We fare this interstellar sea is our trusty vessel, the heliosphere, a much smaller (though still gigantic) magnetic bubble blown up by the Sun. As we orbit the Sun, the solar system itself, encased in the heliosphere, hurtles through the Local Bubble at about 52,000 miles per hour (23 kilometers per second). Interstellar particles pelt the nose of our heliosphere like rain against a windshield.

Our heliosphere is more like a rubber raft than a wooden sailboat: Its surroundings mold its shape. It compresses at points of pressure, expands where it gives way. Exactly how and where our heliosphere’s lining deforms gives us clues about the nature of the interstellar space outside it. This boundary – and any deformities in it – are what Walt Harris, principal investigator for the SHIELDS mission, is after.

SHIELDS is a telescope that will launch aboard a sounding rocket, a small vehicle that flies to space for a few minutes of observing time before falling back to Earth. Harris’ team launched an earlier iteration of the telescope as part of the HYPE mission in 2014, and after modifying the design, they’re ready to launch again.

SHIELDS will measure light from a special population of hydrogen atoms originally from interstellar space. These atoms are neutral, with a balanced number of protons and electrons. Neutral atoms can cross magnetic field lines, so they seep through the heliopause and into our solar system nearly unfazed – but not completely.

The small effects of this boundary crossing are key to SHIELDS’s technique. Charged particles flow around the heliopause, forming a barrier. Neutral particles from interstellar space must pass through this gauntlet, which alters their paths. SHIELDS was designed to reconstruct the trajectories of the neutral particles to determine where they came from and what they saw along the way.

A few minutes after launch, SHIELDS will reach its peak altitude of about 186 miles (300 kilometers) from the ground, far above the absorbing effect of Earth’s atmosphere. Pointing its telescope towards the nose of the heliosphere, it will detect light from arriving hydrogen atoms. Measuring how that light’s wavelength stretches or contracts reveals the particles’ speed. All told, SHIELDS will produce a map to reconstruct the shape and varying density of matter at the heliopause.

The data, Harris hopes, will help answer tantalizing questions about what interstellar space is like.

For instance, astronomers think the Local Bubble as a whole is about 1/10th as dense as most of the rest of the galaxy’s main disk. But we don’t know the details – for instance, is matter in the Local Bubble is distributed evenly, or bunched up in dense pockets surrounded by nothingness? “There’s a lot of uncertainty about the fine structure of the interstellar medium – our maps are kind of crude,” Harris said. “We know the general outlines of these clouds, but we don’t know what’s happening inside them.”

Astronomers also don’t know much about the galaxy’s magnetic field. But it should leave a mark on our heliosphere that SHIELDS can detect, compressing the heliopause in a specific way based on its strength and orientation.

Finally, learning what our current plot of interstellar space is like could be a helpful guide for the (distant) future. Our solar system is just passing through our current patch of space. In some 50,000 years, we’ll be on our way out of the Local Bubble and on to who knows what.

“We don’t really know what that other cloud is like, and we don’t know what happens when you cross a boundary into that cloud,” Harris said. “There’s a lot of interest in understanding what we’re likely to experience as our solar system makes that transition.”

Not that our solar system hasn’t done it before. Over the last four billion years, Harris explains, Earth has passed through a variety of interstellar environments. It’s just that now we’re around, with the scientific tools to document it.

“We’re just trying to understand our place in the galaxy, and where we’re headed in the future,” Harris said.

TOP IMAGE….An illustration of the heliosphere being pelted with cosmic rays from outside our solar system. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab

LOWER IMAGE….Illustration of the Local Bubble. Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Are You Up to the Task of Navigating Space with NASA?

We’re committed to exploration and discovery, journeying to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. But how do we guide our missions on their voyage among the stars? Navigation engineers lead the way!

Using complex mathematical formulas, navigation experts calculate where our spacecraft are and where they’re headed. No matter the destination, navigating the stars is a complicated challenge that faces all our missions. But, we think you’re up to the task!

Our space navigation workbook lets you explore the techniques and mathematical concepts used by navigation engineers. The book delves into groundbreaking navigation innovations like miniaturized atomic clocks, autonomous navigation technologies, using GPS signals at the Moon, and guiding missions through the solar system with X-ray emissions from pulsars — a type of neutron star. It also introduces you to experts working with NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation program at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

If you’re a high schooler who dreams of guiding a rover across the rocky surface of Mars or planning the trajectory of an observer swinging around Venus en route to the Sun, this workbook is for you! Download it today and start your adventure with NASA: https://go.nasa.gov/3i7Pzqr

A small question:

Would anybody want me to do lessons? Like if you send in an ask like 'Hey, what do you know abt *science topic*?' I could do some research and make it a post with links and videos? (Like my Gravitational Waves in the Space-Time Continuum post [link below, and pinned to my acct])

Space Boii

Einstein's Theories of Relativity

Gravitational Waves in the Space-Time Continuum Einstein has two theories of relativity. The first is The Theory of Special Relativity (1905

Would anybody send in asks???

what is the biggest challenge in the preparation of such a mission and how do you handle it?

hey everyone! i’m a peer tutor at my university and i wanted to share some study strategies that i’ve found really helpful in my stem/content-heavy courses. please feel free to share yours with me as well!

(image descriptions under the cut)

Keep reading

The Lives, Times, and Deaths of Stars

Who among us doesn’t covertly read tabloid headlines when we pass them by? But if you’re really looking for a dramatic story, you might want to redirect your attention from Hollywood’s stars to the real thing. From birth to death, these burning spheres of gas experience some of the most extreme conditions our cosmos has to offer.

All stars are born in clouds of dust and gas like the Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula pictured below. In these stellar nurseries, clumps of gas form, pulling in more and more mass as time passes. As they grow, these clumps start to spin and heat up. Once they get heavy and hot enough (like, 27 million degrees Fahrenheit or 15 million degrees Celsius), nuclear fusion starts in their cores. This process occurs when protons, the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, squish together to form helium nuclei. This releases a lot of energy, which heats the star and pushes against the force of its gravity. A star is born.

Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

From then on, stars’ life cycles depend on how much mass they have. Scientists typically divide them into two broad categories: low-mass and high-mass stars. (Technically, there’s an intermediate-mass category, but we’ll stick with these two to keep it straightforward!)

Low-mass stars

A low-mass star has a mass eight times the Sun’s or less and can burn steadily for billions of years. As it reaches the end of its life, its core runs out of hydrogen to convert into helium. Because the energy produced by fusion is the only force fighting gravity’s tendency to pull matter together, the core starts to collapse. But squeezing the core also increases its temperature and pressure, so much so that its helium starts to fuse into carbon, which also releases energy. The core rebounds a little, but the star’s atmosphere expands a lot, eventually turning into a red giant star and destroying any nearby planets. (Don’t worry, though, this is several billion years away for our Sun!)

Red giants become unstable and begin pulsating, periodically inflating and ejecting some of their atmospheres. Eventually, all of the star’s outer layers blow away, creating an expanding cloud of dust and gas misleadingly called a planetary nebula. (There are no planets involved.)

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

All that’s left of the star is its core, now called a white dwarf, a roughly Earth-sized stellar cinder that gradually cools over billions of years. If you could scoop up a teaspoon of its material, it would weigh more than a pickup truck. (Scientists recently found a potential planet closely orbiting a white dwarf. It somehow managed to survive the star’s chaotic, destructive history!)

High-mass stars

A high-mass star has a mass eight times the Sun’s or more and may only live for millions of years. (Rigel, a blue supergiant in the constellation Orion, pictured below, is 18 times the Sun’s mass.)

Credit: Rogelio Bernal Andreo

A high-mass star starts out doing the same things as a low-mass star, but it doesn’t stop at fusing helium into carbon. When the core runs out of helium, it shrinks, heats up, and starts converting its carbon into neon, which releases energy. Later, the core fuses the neon it produced into oxygen. Then, as the neon runs out, the core converts oxygen into silicon. Finally, this silicon fuses into iron. These processes produce energy that keeps the core from collapsing, but each new fuel buys it less and less time. By the point silicon fuses into iron, the star runs out of fuel in a matter of days. The next step would be fusing iron into some heavier element, but doing requires energy instead of releasing it.  

The star’s iron core collapses until forces between the nuclei push the brakes, and then it rebounds back to its original size. This change creates a shock wave that travels through the star’s outer layers. The result is a huge explosion called a supernova.

What’s left behind depends on the star’s initial mass. Remember, a high-mass star is anything with a mass more than eight times the Sun’s — which is a huge range! A star on the lower end of this spectrum leaves behind a city-size, superdense neutron star. (Some of these weird objects can spin faster than blender blades and have powerful magnetic fields. A teaspoon of their material would weigh as much as a mountain.)

At even higher masses, the star’s core turns into a black hole, one of the most bizarre cosmic objects out there. Black holes have such strong gravity that light can’t escape them. If you tried to get a teaspoon of material to weigh, you wouldn’t get it back once it crossed the event horizon — unless it could travel faster than the speed of light, and we don’t know of anything that can! (We’re a long way from visiting a black hole, but if you ever find yourself near one, there are some important safety considerations you should keep in mind.)

The explosion also leaves behind a cloud of debris called a supernova remnant. These and planetary nebulae from low-mass stars are the sources of many of the elements we find on Earth. Their dust and gas will one day become a part of other stars, starting the whole process over again.

That’s a very brief summary of the lives, times, and deaths of stars. (Remember, there’s that whole intermediate-mass category we glossed over!) To keep up with the most recent stellar news, follow NASA Universe on Twitter and Facebook.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

Gravitational Waves in the Space-Time Continuum

Einstein's Theories of Relativity

Einstein has two theories of relativity. The first is The Theory of Special Relativity (1905). This is a theory of mechanics that correctly describes the motions of objects moving near the speed of light. This theory predicts that mass increases with velocity. The equation is E=MC^2 or Energy = Mass × Speed of Light ^2.

In 1916, Einstein proposed the Theory of General Relativity, which generalized his Theory of Special Relativity and had the first predictions of gravitational waves. It implied a few things.

Space-Time is a 4-Dimensional continuum.

Principle of equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass.

This suggests that Mass-Energy distorts the fabric of space-time in a predictable way (gravitational waves). It also implies

Strong gravitational force makes time slow down.

Light is altered by gravity

Gravity in strong gravitational fields will no longer obey Newton's Inverse-Square Law.

What is Newton's Inverse-Square Law?

Newton's Inverse-Square Law suggests that the force of gravity between any two objects is inversely proportional to the square of the separation distance between the two centers.

Stephen Hawking's Theory of Everything

Stephen Hawking's Theory of Everything is the solution to Einstein's equation in his Theory of General Relativity. It says that the mass density of the universe exceeds the critical density.

Critical Density: amount of mass needed to make a universe adopt a flat geometry.

This theory states that when the universe gets too big it will crash back into its center in a "Big Crunch" creating giant black hole. The energy from this "Big Crunch" will rebound and create a new "Big Bang".

Big Crunch: hypothetical scenario for the end of the known universe. The expansion of the universe will reverse and collapse on itself. The energy generated will create a new Big Bang, creating a new universe.

Big Bang: Matter will expand from a single point from a state of high density and matter. This will mark the birth of a new universe.

Basic Facts about Gravitational Waves

Invisible "ripples" in the Space-Time Continuum

Travel at the speed of light

186,000 miles per second / 299,337.984 Kilometers per second

11,160,000 miles per minute / 17,960,279.04 Kilometers per minute

669,600,000 miles per hour / 1,077,616,742.4 Kilometers per hour

There are four (4) defined categories

Continuous

Stochastic

Burst

Compact Binary Inspiral

What is LIGO?

The first proof of the existence of gravitational waves came in 1974. 20+ years after Einstein's death.

The first physical proof came in 2015, 100 years after his theory was published. The waves were detected by LIGO.

LIGO- Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory

The waves detected in 2015 came from 2 black holes that collided 1.3 billion years ago in the constellation Hydra. 1.3 billion years ago multicellular life was just beginning to spread on Earth, it was before the time of the dinosaurs!

Continuous Gravitational Waves

Produced by a single spinning massive object.

Caused by imperfections on the surface.

The spin rate of the object is constant. The waves are come at a continuous frequency.

Stochastic Gravitational Waves

Smalles waves

Hardest to detect

Possibly caused by remnants of gravitational radiation left over from the Big Bang

Could possibly allow us to look at the history of the Universe.

Small waves from every direction mixed together.

Burst Gravitational Waves

Never been detected.

Like ever.

Never ever.

Not once.

Nope

No

N E V E R

We don't know anything about them.

If we learn about them they could reveal the greatest revolutionary information about the universe.

Compact Binary Inspiral Gravitational Waves

All waves detected by LIGO fall into this category.

Produced by orbiting pairs of massive and dense objects. (Neutron Stars, Black Holes)

Three (3) subclasses

Binary Neutron Star (BNS) // Two (2) Neutron Stars colliding

Binary Black Hole (BBH) // Two (2) Black Holes colliding

Neutron Star- Black Hole Binary (NSBH) // A black hole and a neutron star colliding

Each subclass creates its own unique wave pattern.

Waves are all caused by the smae mechanism called an "inspiral".

Occur over millions of years.

Over eons the objects orbit closer together.

The closer they get, the faster they spin.

Sources Used:

On The Shoulders Of Giants by Stephen Hawking

Oxford Astronomy Encyclopedia

LIGO Lab | Caltech

LIGO Lab | Caltech | MIT

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) consists of two widely separated installations within the United States — one

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National Aeronautics and Space Administration

NASA.gov brings you the latest news, images and videos from America's space agency, pioneering the future in space exploration, scientific d

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