For the first time, a NASA spacecraft has directly observed “alien” particles that came from beyond our solar system, astronomers announced today.
The discovery not only gives us a glimpse of what exists in the so-called interstellar medium—the matter between stars—but also offers clues to the anatomy of our local galactic neighborhood.
Orbiting Earth some 200,000 miles (322,000 kilometers) away, the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft was able to snag samples of hydrogen, oxygen, and neon that came from interstellar space.
“It’s exciting to be able to have these first observations of alien matter—stuff that didn’t come from our sun or the planets, but came from the outside of our solar system, from other parts of the galaxy,” David McComas, team leader for the IBEX program, said during a NASA news conference Tuesday.
“We think these are really important measurements, because these elements are the fundamental building blocks of stars, planets, and people.”
Colossal Storm Rages Over Saturn’s Surface
The largest storm seen on Saturn in more than 21 years has now been encircling the planet for a record-breaking 200 days.
First appearing as a tiny blemish on Dec. 5, 2010, the storm is still going strong today, surpassing the ringed giant’s previous longest tempest, which lasted 150 days back in 1903. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, in orbit around Saturn, has given astronomers a front-seat view of this enormous maelstrom and provided valuable data.
From its humble beginnings, the storm has grown to engulf the entire area between Saturn’s 30th and 51st north latitudes. From north to south, the tempest stretches about 9,000 miles — greater than diameter of the Earth — and covers two billion square miles, or eight times the surface area of our planet.
Watch a comet smash into the Sun, followed by a massive solar explosion
What you see in this amazing video really is just a coincidence. A comet smashed into one side of the Sun just as a massive explosion ignited on the other side. Two entirely unrelated events…but they sure look awesome together.
Black Hole Caught in Act of Swallowing Star
A NASA video animation depicting the supermassive black hole Swift J1644+57 eating a big star, a process that scientists witnessed for the first time using the Swift satellite.
Last year, NASA announced that it had discovered 14 of the coldest stars it had ever recorded. The so-called “brown dwarfs” were, at that time, listed among the coldest known stars in our universe.
Now, employing the same instrumentation it used to detect last year’s brown dwarfs, NASA has identified six new, even-cooler orbs known as “Y-dwarfs.” Y-dwarfs are the coldest members of the brown dwarf family, which makes these stars the coolest of the cool. How cool you ask? Try cooler than the human body.
A list of all NASA´s current missions
It´s quite easy to get lost in the middle of the data NASA releases to the world on a daily basis. There are more than 50 missions right now under the agency´s supervision, all of them producing a myriad of amazing images and information about many different subjects such as sunspots, Earth´s atmosphere, Saturn´s moons, the birth of stars at distant galaxies and faraway asteroids.
To help us follow all that, NASA has listed all current missions on alphabetical order in a way that clicking on each one of them takes you to a specific page about the mission with all the data you need to understand all those probes, satellites, robots, telescopes and on.
To embark on its next chapter in human space exploration, NASA has created a new department to oversee manned spaceflight in the post-space-shuttle era.
The department is called the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, and combines two previous organizations, the Space Operations Directorate and the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate.
The reorganization is part of top-to-bottom changes moving through the space agency, which finds itself at a turning point. This year NASA retired its 30-year-old space shuttle program, which was the focus and most visible part of its activities over the last few decades. The agency is now gearing up for an era of human missions to deep space, including trips back to the moon, then on to asteroids and Mars.
