So Close, So Far: See Juno’s First Orbit Of Jupiter In This Amateur-created JunoCam “marble Movie.” 

Comin’ in Hot: Seven Things to Know About our New Heat Shield

What goes up, must come down, and from space, without burning up in an atmosphere. That’s why we’re pumped for the Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator, or LOFTID. Launching on Nov. 1, 2022, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Joint Polar Orbiting Satellite System-2 (JPSS-2) mission, this technology demonstration marks the next step in advancing an innovative heat shield design that could one day be used to land heavy payloads – including humans – on Mars!

Here are seven things to know about this innovative re-entry system: 

1. LOFTID is the first-ever in-orbit test of this technology. 

Inflatable heat shields, called Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerators (HIADs), have been in the works for more than a decade. In 2012, the third of the Inflatable Re-entry Vehicle Experiments (IRVE) launched on a suborbital sounding rocket from the Wallops Flight Facility, demonstrating a 3-meter (10-foot) diameter inflatable heat shield.

But the LOFTID re-entry vehicle, at 19.7 feet (6 meters) in diameter, will be the largest blunt body aeroshell to ever go through atmospheric entry. Designed to withstand temperatures as high as 2900°F (1600°C), this first-ever in-orbit test of this technology will prove if it can successfully slow down large payloads – such as crewed spacecraft, robotic explorers, and rocket components – enabling them to survive the heat of re-entry at planetary destinations with an atmosphere.

2. You can find out how this tech works in real-time.  

LOFTID is unique in that all operations will happen within a few hours of launch. After the JPSS-2 satellite safely reaches orbit, the LOFTID vehicle will separate from the upper stage of the Atlas V rocket and begin re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. If all goes as planned, the technology will help the vehicle decelerate from hypersonic (more than 25 times faster than the speed of sound) down to subsonic flight, less than 609 miles per hour for a safe splash down and recovery from the Pacific Ocean. 

While in flight, engineers at NASA’s Langley Research Center will receive location data every 20 seconds and onboard sensors and cameras will record more comprehensive data about the technology’s performance. You can get a behind-the-scenes look at Langley’s Flight Mission Support Center where the LOFTID project team will be monitoring the flight test at NASA.gov/live following the launch.

3. A lemon-sized capsule ejected into the Pacific Ocean will hold key flight data. 

The LOFTID re-entry vehicle will record both sensor and camera data during its flight. The data will include the temperatures and pressures experienced by the heat shield and will illustrate how well the technology performed during the demonstration.

Although the goal is to retrieve the LOFTID re-entry vehicle after it splashes down in the Pacific Ocean, the team wanted a back-up option just in case they can’t recover it. Enter the tiny yellow package called an ejectable data module (EDM) which will also record flight data. The EDM will be released from the spacecraft at an altitude of about 50,000 feet. It will free fall into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Hawaii and should land within 10 miles of the spacecraft’s splash down location. A recovery team, that has practiced hide-and-seek of the EDM on land and sea, will use GPS to search an approximately 900-mile area of the Pacific Ocean to find their “lemon.”

4. This heat shield packs a punch. 

Although NASA has historically relied on rigid aeroshells, parachutes, and retro-propulsion (rockets) to decelerate people, vehicles, and hardware during entry, descent, and landing operations, a benefit of inflatable heat shields is that they take up less space in a rocket, allowing more room for other hardware or payloads. LOFTID’s aeroshell has been folded and tightly packed down to 4 by 1.5 feet for launch and stacked in the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket payload fairing.

5. LOFTID is dedicated in honor of one of its innovators.  

LOFTID was developed as a partnership with ULA and is dedicated to the memory of Bernard Kutter, ULA manager of advanced programs, who passed away in August 2020. Kutter was instrumental in advancing the inflatable heat shield design and developing the plan to test the system on an Atlas V rocket. He was an advocate for both space technology and expanding access to space. Kutter’s NASA and ULA counterparts agree that LOFTID is unlikely to have made it to space without his vision and passion.

6. LOFTID is made of tough stuff. 

Synthetic fibers make up the inflatable structure, braided into tubes that are, by weight, 10 times stronger than steel. The tubes are coiled so that they form the shape of a blunt cone when inflated. The thermal protection system that covers the inflatable structure can survive searing entry temperatures up to 2,900 degrees Fahrenheit. Researchers used the same heat-shielding materials to create a fire shelter prototype for firefighters battling forest fires.

7. You can make your own LOFTID Halloween costume! 

Still looking for an out-of-this world Halloween costume? With a few commonly found materials, like orange pool noodles and duct tape, you can create your own LOFTID costume. However, we make no promises of protecting or slowing you down from becoming the life of the party.

Follow @NASA_Technology for the latest updates on LOFTID. Don’t miss our live coverage leading up to launch from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The NASA Edge JPSS-2 Tower Rollback Show airs live on NASA TV and YouTube on Tuesday, Nov. 1 at 12 a.m. EDT, and NASA TV live launch coverage will begin at 4:45 a.m. EDT. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

What’s Up - March 2018

What’s Up For March?

Several Planets and the Zodiacal Light!

This month, at sunset, catch elusive Mercury, bright Venus, the Zodiacal Light, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter between midnight and dawn!

Both Venus and Mercury play the part of "evening stars" this month. At the beginning of the month they appear low on the western horizon.

The Moon itself joins the pair from March 18th through the 20th. 

The Moon skims by the Pleiades star cluster and Taurus's bright red star Aldebaran on the next few evenings, March 21 through the 23rd.

Jupiter, king of the planets, rises just before midnight this month and earlier by month end. 

Even through the smallest telescope or average binoculars, you should see the 4 Galilean moons, Europa, Io, Callisto and Ganymede.

The March morning sky offers dazzling views of Mars and Saturn all month long.

Through a telescope, you can almost make out some of the surface features on Mars.

Look a little farther into Mars' future and circle May 5th with a red marker. When our InSight spacecraft launches for its 6 month journey to the Red Planet, Mars will be easily visible to your unaided eye. 

Keep watching Mars as it travels closer to Earth. It will be closest in late July, when the red planet will appear larger in apparent diameter than it has since 2003!

You are in for a real treat if you can get away to a dark sky location on a moonless night this month -- the Zodiacal Light and the Milky Way intersect! 

The Zodiacal light is a faint triangular glow seen from a dark sky just after sunset in the spring or just before sunrise in the fall.

The more familiar Milky Way is one of the spiral arms of our galaxy. 

What we're seeing is sunlight reflecting off dust grains that circle the Sun in the inner solar system. These dust grains journey across our sky in the ecliptic, the same plane as the Moon and the planets.

Watch the full What’s Up for March Video: 

There are so many sights to see in the sky. To stay informed, subscribe to our What’s Up video series on Facebook. Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.   

What are CubeSats?

CubeSats are a class of research spacecraft called nanosatellites. They provide low-cost opportunities for small satellite payloads to fly on rockets planned for upcoming launches. Small satellites, including CubeSats, are playing an increasingly larger role in exploration, technology demonstration, scientific research and educational investigations here at NASA. 

Fourteen miniature satellites were deployed from the International Space Station earlier this week. Two of the CubeSats were Danish and have communication and ship signal tracking capabilities. The remaining are Dove satellites from Planet Labs and will take images of Earth from space.

On Thursday, Oct. 8, thirteen CubeSats are scheduled to launch aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at 8:49 a.m. EDT. Watch live on NASA TV starting at 8:29 a.m. http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv

To learn more about tomorrow’s launch, watch NASA Television today, Oct. 7 at 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. EDT. The briefings will highlight the growing importance of CubeSats in space exploration.

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

Happy 4th of July… From Space!

In Hollywood blockbusters, explosions and eruptions are often among the stars of the show. In space, explosions, eruptions and twinkling of actual stars are a focus for scientists who hope to better understand their births, lives, deaths and how they interact with their surroundings. Spend some of your Fourth of July taking a look at these celestial phenomenon:

Credit: NASA/Chandra X-ray Observatory

An Astral Exhibition

This object became a sensation in the astronomical community when a team of researchers pointed at it with our Chandra X-ray Observatory telescope in 1901, noting that it suddenly appeared as one of the brightest stars in the sky for a few days, before gradually fading away in brightness. Today, astronomers cite it as an example of a “classical nova,” an outburst produced by a thermonuclear explosion on the surface of a white dwarf star, the dense remnant of a Sun-like star.

Credit: NASA/Hubble Space Telescope

A Twinkling Tapestry

The brilliant tapestry of young stars flaring to life resemble a glittering fireworks display. The sparkling centerpiece is a giant cluster of about 3,000 stars called Westerlund 2, named for Swedish astronomer Bengt Westerlund who discovered the grouping in the 1960s. The cluster resides in a raucous stellar breeding ground located 20,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Carina.

Credit: NASA/THEMIS/Sebastian Saarloos

An Illuminating Aurora

Sometimes during solar magnetic events, solar explosions hurl clouds of magnetized particles into space. Traveling more than a million miles per hour, these coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, made up of hot material called plasma take up to three days to reach Earth. Spacecraft and satellites in the path of CMEs can experience glitches as these plasma clouds pass by. In near-Earth space, magnetic reconnection incites explosions of energy driving charged solar particles to collide with atoms in Earth’s upper atmosphere. We see these collisions near Earth’s polar regions as the aurora. Three spacecraft from our Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) mission, observed these outbursts known as substorms.

Credit: NASA/Hubble Space Telescope//ESA/STScI

A Shining Supermassive Merger

Every galaxy has a black hole at its center. Usually they are quiet, without gas accretions, like the one in our Milky Way. But if a star creeps too close to the black hole, the gravitational tides can rip away the star’s gaseous matter. Like water spinning around a drain, the gas swirls into a disk around the black hole at such speeds that it heats to millions of degrees. As an inner ring of gas spins into the black hole, gas particles shoot outward from the black hole’s polar regions. Like bullets shot from a rifle, they zoom through the jets at velocities close to the speed of light. Astronomers using our Hubble Space Telescope observed correlations between supermassive black holes and an event similar to tidal disruption, pictured above in the Centaurus A galaxy. 

Credit: NASA/Hubble Space Telescope/ESA

A Stellar Explosion

Supernovae can occur one of two ways. The first occurs when a white dwarf—the remains of a dead star—passes so close to a living star that its matter leaks into the white dwarf. This causes a catastrophic explosion. However most people understand supernovae as the death of a massive star. When the star runs out of fuel toward the end of its life, the gravity at its heart sucks the surrounding mass into its center. At the turn of the 19th century, the binary star system Eta Carinae was faint and undistinguished. Our Hubble Telescope captured this image of Eta Carinae, binary star system. The larger of the two stars in the Eta Carinae system is a huge and unstable star that is nearing the end of its life, and the event that the 19th century astronomers observed was a stellar near-death experience. Scientists call these outbursts supernova impostor events, because they appear similar to supernovae but stop just short of destroying their star.

Credit: NASA/GSFC/SDO

An Eye-Catching Eruption

Extremely energetic objects permeate the universe. But close to home, the Sun produces its own dazzling lightshow, producing the largest explosions in our solar system and driving powerful solar storms.. When solar activity contorts and realigns the Sun’s magnetic fields, vast amounts of energy can be driven into space. This phenomenon can create a sudden flash of light—a solar flare.The above picture features a filament eruption on the Sun, accompanied by solar flares captured by our Solar Dynamics Observatory.

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

Travel Posters of Fantastic Excursions

What would the future look like if people were regularly visiting to other planets and moons? These travel posters give a glimpse into that imaginative future. Take a look and choose your destination:

The Grand Tour

Our Voyager mission took advantage of a once-every-175-year alignment of the outer planets for a grand tour of the solar system. The twin spacecraft revealed details about Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – using each planet’s gravity to send them on to the next destination.

Mars

Our Mars Exploration Program seeks to understand whether Mars was, is, or can be a habitable world. This poster imagines a future day when we have achieved our vision of human exploration of the Red Planet and takes a nostalgic look back at the great imagined milestones of Mars exploration that will someday be celebrated as “historic sites.”

Earth

There’s no place like home. Warm, wet and with an atmosphere that’s just right, Earth is the only place we know of with life – and lots of it. Our Earth science missions monitor our home planet and how it’s changing so it can continue to provide a safe haven as we reach deeper into the cosmos.

Venus

The rare science opportunity of planetary transits has long inspired bold voyages to exotic vantage points – journeys such as James Cook’s trek to the South Pacific to watch Venus and Mercury cross the face of the sun in 1769. Spacecraft now allow us the luxury to study these cosmic crossings at times of our choosing from unique locales across our solar system.

Ceres

Ceres is the closest dwarf planet to the sun. It is the largest object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, with an equatorial diameter of about 965 kilometers. After being studied with telescopes for more than two centuries, Ceres became the first dwarf planet to be explored by a spacecraft, when our Dawn probe arrived in orbit in March 2015. Dawn’s ongoing detailed observations are revealing intriguing insights into the nature of this mysterious world of ice and rock.

Jupiter

The Jovian cloudscape boasts the most spectacular light show in the solar system, with northern and southern lights to dazzle even the most jaded space traveler. Jupiter’s auroras are hundreds of times more powerful than Earth’s, and they form a glowing ring around each pole that’s bigger than our home planet. 

Enceladus

The discovery of Enceladus’ icy jets and their role in creating Saturn’s E-ring is one of the top findings of the Cassini mission to Saturn. Further Cassini discoveries revealed strong evidence of a global ocean and the first signs of potential hydrothermal activity beyond Earth – making this tiny Saturnian moon one of the leading locations in the search for possible life beyond Earth.

Titan

Frigid and alien, yet similar to our own planet billions of years ago, Saturn’s largest moon, Titan has a thick atmosphere, organic-rich chemistry and surface shaped by rivers and lakes of liquid ethane and methane. Our Cassini orbiter was designed to peer through Titan’s perpetual haze and unravel the mysteries of this planet-like moon.

Europa

Astonishing geology and the potential to host the conditions for simple life making Jupiter’s moon Europa a fascinating destination for future exploration. Beneath its icy surface, Europa is believed to conceal a global ocean of salty liquid water twice the volume of Earth’s oceans. Tugging and flexing from Jupiter’s gravity generates enough heat to keep the ocean from freezing.

You can download free poster size images of these thumbnails here: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/visions-of-the-future/

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

Why Do Some Galactic Unions Lead to Doom?

Three images from our Spitzer Space Telescope show pairs of galaxies on the cusp of cosmic consolidations. Though the galaxies appear separate now, gravity is pulling them together, and soon they will combine to form new, merged galaxies. Some merged galaxies will experience billions of years of growth. For others, however, the merger will kick off processes that eventually halt star formation, dooming the galaxies.

Only a few percent of galaxies in the nearby universe are merging, but galaxy mergers were more common between 6 billion and 10 billion years ago, and these processes profoundly shaped our modern galactic landscape. Scientists study nearby galaxy mergers and use them as local laboratories for that earlier period in the universe's history. The survey has focused on 200 nearby objects, including many galaxies in various stages of merging.

Merging galaxies in the nearby universe appear especially bright to infrared observatories like Spitzer. In these images, different colors correspond to different wavelengths of infrared light, which are not visible to the human eye. Blue corresponds to 3.6 microns, and green corresponds to 4.5 microns - both strongly emitted by stars. Red corresponds to 8.0 microns, a wavelength mostly emitted by dust.

Read more: https://go.nasa.gov/2VioFB0.

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

5 things that may surprise you about the Moon

...In honor of International Observe the Moon Night

October 28th is International Observe the Moon Night, a worldwide, public celebration of lunar science and exploration held annually since 2010 thanks to our Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission team and partners. One day each year, everyone on Earth is invited to observe and learn about the Moon together, and to celebrate the cultural and personal connections we all have with our planet’s nearest neighbor.

Here are 5 things that might surprise you about the Moon.

1. There has been a spacecraft there for 100 lunar days

In October 2017, LRO celebrates one hundred days of collecting scientific data at the Moon. One hundred Moon days. From our perspective on Earth, one lunar day is one full phase cycle, or about 29.5 Earth days. That's 100 opportunities to observe changes from night to day, photograph the surface at different Sun angles, measure rising and falling temperatures, study the way certain chemicals react to the daily light and temperature cycle, and increase our understanding of the Moon as a dynamic place.

2. You can still see the paths left by Apollo astronauts’ boot prints and rovers

Much of the lunar surface is covered in very fine dust. When Apollo astronauts landed on the Moon, the descent stage engine disturbed the dust and produced a distinct bright halo around the lunar module. As astronauts moved around, their tracks exposed the darker soil underneath, creating distinct trails that we know, thanks to LRO, are still visible today. The Moon has no atmosphere, so there is no wind to wipe away these tracks.

3. The Moon has tattoos!

Observations from LRO show mysterious patterns of light and dark that are unique to the Moon. These lunar swirls look painted on, like the Moon got ‘inked.’ Lunar swirls, like these imaged at Reiner Gamma by LRO, are found at more than 100 locations across the lunar surface. Lunar swirls can be tens of miles across and appear in groups or as isolated features. 

Researchers think these patterns form in places where there’s still a remnant of the Moon’s magnetic field. There are still many competing theories about how swirls form, but the primary idea is that the local magnetic field deflects the energetic particles in the solar wind, so there’s not as much weathering of the surface. The magnetically shielded areas would then look brighter than everything around them.

4. There were once active volcanoes, that shaped what we see now

Early astronomers named the large dark spots that we see on the near side of the Moon “maria,” Latin for “seas,” because that’s what they thought they were. We now know that the dark spots are cooled lava, called basalt, formed from ancient volcanic eruptions. The Moon’s volcanoes are no longer active, but their past shapes the Moon that we see today. The Moon doesn’t have large volcanoes like ones in Hawaii, but it does have smaller cones and domes. 

Other small features derived from volcanic activity include rivers of dried lava flows, like the ones visible in this image of Vallis Schroteri taken by LRO, and dark areas formed from eruptive volcanoes that spewed fire. For many years, scientists thought the Moon’s volcanic activity died out long ago, but there’s some evidence for relatively “young” volcanism, suggesting that the activity gradually slowed down instead of stopping abruptly.

5. Anyone, anywhere can participate in International Observe the Moon Night.  

How to celebrate International Observe the Moon Night

Attend an event –  See where events are happening near you by visiting http://observethemoonnight.org

Host an event – Call up your neighbors and friends and head outdoors – no special equipment is needed. Let us know how you celebrated by registering your event!

Don’t let cloudy weather get you down! Observe the Moon in a variety of ways from the comfort of indoors – View stunning lunar vistas through images and videos, or explore the Moon on your own with QuickMap or Moon Trek

Join the worldwide conversation with #ObserveTheMoon on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook

For regular Moon-related facts, updates and science, follow @NASAMoon on Twitter

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

How Well Do You Know Mercury?

Mercury is the smallest planet in our solar system and is only slightly larger than Earth’s moon. To give you some perspective, if the sun were as tall as a typical front door, Earth would be the size of a nickel and Mercury would be about as big as a green pea.

Mercury is the closest planet to the sun. Daytime temperatures can reach 430 degrees Celsius (800 degrees Fahrenheit) and drop to –180 degrees Celsius (-290 degrees Fahrenheit) at night.

Here are a few fun facts about Mercury:

Mercury takes only 88 Earth days to orbit the sun

If we could stand on Mercury’s surface when it is at its closest point to the sun, the sun would appear more than three times larger than it does here on Earth

Mercury is home to one of the largest impact basins in the solar system: the Caloris Basin. The diameter of this impact basin is the length of 16,404 football fields (minus the end zones) placed end to end!

Mercury is one of only two planets in our solar system that do not have moons (Venus is the other one)

Mercury completes three rotations for every two orbits around the sun. That means that if you wanted to stay up from sunrise to sunrise on Mercury, you’d be up for 176 Earth days…you’d need a LOT of coffee! 

Two missions have visited Mercury:

Mariner 10 was the first mission to Mercury, and 30 years later, our MESSENGER mission was the second to visit the planet. Mariner 10 was also the first spacecraft to reach one planet by using the gravity of another planet (in this case, Venus) to alter its speed and trajectory.

MESSENGER was the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, The spacecraft had its own shades to protect it from the light of the sun. This is important since sunlight on Mercury can be as much as 11 times brighter than it is here on Earth. The spacecraft was originally planned to orbit Mercury for one year, but exceeded expectations and worked for over four years capturing extensive data. On April 30, 2015, the spacecraft succumbed to the pull of solar gravity and impacted Mercury’s surface.

Water Ice?

The MESSENGER spacecraft observed compelling support for the long-held hypothesis that Mercury harbors abundant water ice and other frozen volatile materials in its permanently shadowed polar craters.

This radar image of Mercury’s north polar region. The areas shown in red were captured by MESSENGER, compared to the yellow deposits imaged by Earth-based radar. These areas are believed to consist of water ice.

Mercury Transit of the Sun

For more than seven hours on Monday, May 9, Mercury will be visible as a tiny black dot crossing the face of the sun. This rare event – which happens only slightly more than once a decade – is called a transit.

Where: Skywatchers in Western Europe, South America and eastern North America will be able to see the entirety of the transit. The entire 7.5-hour path across the sun will be visible across the Eastern U.S. – with magnification and proper solar filters – while those in the West can observe the transit in progress at sunrise.

Watch: We will stream a live program on NASA TV and the agency’s Facebook page from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. – an informal roundtable during which experts representing planetary, heliophysics and astrophysics will discuss the science behind the Mercury transit. Viewers can ask questions via Facebook and Twitter using #AskNASA. Unlike the 2012 Venus transit of the sun, Mercury is too small to be visible without magnification from a telescope or high-powered binoculars. Both must have safe solar filters made of specially-coated glass or Mylar; you can never look directly at the sun.

To learn more about our solar system and the planets, visit: http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/

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

Visual 'Autocorrect' for NASA Space Telescope

Telescopes located both on the ground and in space continue to dazzle us with incredible images of the universe. We owe these sharp vistas to a series of brilliant astronomers, including Andrea Ghez – an astrophysicist and professor at UCLA – and the “Mother of Hubble,” Nancy Grace Roman.

Did you know that stars don’t actually twinkle? They only look like they do because their light has to travel through our turbulent atmosphere to reach our eyes. As the atmosphere shifts and swirls around, the light from distant stars is slightly refracted, or bent, in different directions. Sometimes it’s directed right at us, but sometimes it’s directed a bit to the side.

It's like someone’s shining a flashlight toward you but moving it around slightly. Sometimes the beam is pointed right at you and appears very bright, and sometimes it's pointed a bit to either side of you and it appears dimmer. The amount of light isn't really changing, but it looks like it is.

This effect creates a problem for ground-based telescopes. Instead of seeing sharp images, astronomers get fuzzy pictures. Special tech known as adaptive optics helps resolve pictures of space so astronomers can see things more clearly. It’s even useful for telescopes that are in space, above Earth’s atmosphere, because tiny imperfections in their optics can blur images, too.

In 2020, Andrea Ghez was awarded a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics for devising an experiment that proved there’s a supermassive black hole embedded in the heart of our galaxy – something Hubble has shown is true of almost every galaxy in the universe! She used the W. M. Keck Observatory’s adaptive optics to track stars orbiting the unseen black hole.

A woman named Nancy Grace Roman, who was NASA’s first chief astronomer, paved the way for telescopes that study the universe from space. An upcoming observatory named in her honor, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, will use a special kind of adaptive optics in its Coronagraph Instrument, which is a technology demonstration designed to block the glare from host stars and reveal dimmer orbiting planets.

Roman’s Coronagraph Instrument will come equipped with deformable mirrors that will serve as a form of visual "autocorrect" by measuring and subtracting starlight in real time. The mirrors will bend and flex to help counteract effects like temperature changes, which can slightly alter the shape of the optics.

Other telescopes have taken pictures of enormous, young, bright planets orbiting far away from their host stars because they’re usually the easiest ones to see. Taking tech that’s worked well on ground-based telescopes to space will help Roman photograph dimmer, older, colder planets than any other observatory has been able to so far. The mission could even snap the first real photograph of a planet like Jupiter orbiting a Sun-like star!

Find out more about the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on Twitter and Facebook, and learn about the person from which the mission draws its name.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

Say Hello to NGC 6441

Location: In the Scorpius constellation

Distance from Earth: About 44,000 light-years

Object type: Globular star cluster

Discovered by: James Dunlop in 1826

Each tiny point of light in this image is its own star - and there are more than a million of them! This stunning image captured by the Hubble Telescope depicts NGC 6441, a globular cluster that weighs about 1.6 million times the mass of our Sun. Globular clusters like NGC 6441 are groups of old stars held together by their mutual gravitational attraction, appearing nearly spherical in shape due to the density of stars that comprises them. This particular cluster is one of the most massive and luminous in our Milky Way Galaxy. It is also home to a planetary nebula and four pulsars (rotating neutron stars that emit beams of radiation at steady intervals, detected when the beams are aimed at Earth). 

Read more information about NGC 6441 here.

Right now, the Hubble Space Telescope is delving into its #StarrySights campaign! Find more star cluster content and spectacular new images by following along on Hubble’s Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!