Happy Ace Awareness Week! #AAWArt

Somewhere in the heart of the Mojave Desert

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NASAs Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this image of a significant solar flare as seen in the bright flash on the right on Dec. 19, 2014. The image shows a subset of extreme ultraviolet light that highlights the extremely hot material in flares

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NGC1491 in Perseus

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The Veil Nebula, NGC 6960

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What Happened to Mars?

Billions of years ago, Mars was a very different world. Liquid water flowed in long rivers that emptied into lakes and shallow seas. A thick atmosphere blanketed the planet and kept it warm.

Today, Mars is bitter cold. The Red Planet’s thin and wispy atmosphere provides scant cover for the surface below.

Our MAVEN Mission

The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission is part of our Mars Scout program. This spacecraft launched in November 2013, and is exploring the Red Planet’s upper atmosphere, ionosphere and interactions with the sun and solar wind.

The purpose of the MAVEN mission is to determine the state of the upper atmosphere of Mars, the processes that control it and the overall atmospheric loss that is currently occurring. Specifically, MAVEN is exploring the processes through which the top of the Martian atmosphere can be lost to space. Scientists think that this loss could be important in explaining the changes in the climate of Mars that have occurred over the last four billion years.

New Findings

Today, Nov. 5, we will share new details of key science findings from our ongoing exploration of Mars during a news briefing at 2 p.m. EDT. This event will be broadcast live on NASA Television. Have questions? Use #askNASA during the briefing.

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

Bright Spiral Galaxy M81 : One of the brightest galaxies in planet Earths sky is similar in size to our Milky Way Galaxy: big, beautiful M81. The grand spiral galaxy can be found toward the northern constellation of the Great Bear . This superbly detailed image reveals M81s bright yellow nucleus, blue spiral arms, tell tale pinkish star forming regions, and sweeping cosmic dust lanes with a scale comparable to the Milky Way. Hinting at a disorderly past, a remarkable dust lane actually runs straight through the disk, to the left of the galactic center, contrary to M81s other prominent spiral features. The errant dust lane may be the lingering result of a close encounter between between M81 and its smaller companion galaxy, M82. Scrutiny of variable stars in M81 has yielded one of the best determined distances for an external galaxy 11.8 million light-years. M81s dwarf companion galaxy Holmberg IX can be seen just above the large spiral. via NASA

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Asexual sky

Me, an asexual astronaut: space ace

Hourglass Nebula

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