Gelatin In Space!  Looks A Bit Like A Tadpole When It Is Floating Around, But I Promise It Was A Tasty

Solar System: Things to Know This Week

Here are a few things you should know about our solar system this week:

1. Beyond Pluto

The principle investigator for the New Horizons mission reports that the spacecraft is healthy and has recently completed the halfway point in its long download of 50-plus gigabits of data about the Pluto system. Now, the New Horizons team has submitted a proposal to continue the exploration. Find out more HERE.

2. A Planet of Particular Importance

April 22 is Earth Day, and we’re deeply involved in studying and understanding how to protect our one and only home world. Join us for a #24Seven celebration of Earth Day. Learn more about our missions to Earth HERE.

3. It’s True — All of It

Sci-fi meets real space exploration when BB8 the droid gets to know Maggie, the engineering model for the Mars Curiosity rover, in a short video produced by some of the people behind Star Wars. Take a look HERE. Photo credit: LucasFilm

4. Bringing Home a Piece of the Sky

Did you know that we’re planning to bring part of an asteroid to Earth? The ambitious OSIRIS-REx mission, which will retrieve a sample from the asteroid Bennu, is slated for launch later this year.

5. Catch Them — If You Can

The best time to view the Lyrids meteor shower will be just before dawn on April 23, when the constellation Lyra is overhead and the moon will be near to setting. Be aware, however, that this year the light of the full moon will make them harder to spot. Find out what else is up in this month’s night skies HERE.

Want to learn more? Read our full list of things to know this week about the solar system HERE.

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Candy Cane of Cosmic Proportions

Imagine how long it would take to eat a candy cane that’s a thousand trillion miles tall! 😋

Scientists peering into the center of our Milky Way galaxy found this 190-light-year tall “candy cane,” but (sadly) it is not a peppermint treat. It does contain other goodies, though. They have found huge collections of material, called giant molecular clouds, where stars are being born. And there are magnetic fields that might be evidence of a bubble from an outburst in our galactic center long ago.

The full image shows our galaxy’s center in infrared (blue), radio (red) and microwave (“minty” green) light. The picture essentially color codes different ways light is produced. The blue and cyan regions show us cool dust where star formation has just begun. Yellow features show more-established star “factories.” Red reveals places where electrically charged gas interacts with magnetic fields.

This image includes newly published observations using an instrument designed and built at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, called the Goddard-IRAM Superconducting 2-Millimeter Observer (GISMO). It was used with a 30-meter radio telescope located on Pico Veleta, Spain, operated by the Institute for Radio Astronomy in the Millimeter Range headquartered in Grenoble, France. The image shows a region about 750 light-years wide.

Find out more about this image and what we can learn from studying star factories!

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What popular film is the closest to reality for you?

Dolphins x Astronauts: The collab we didn't know we needed 

A pod of curious dolphins added extra meaning and porpoise to the recovery of Crew-9′s SpaceX Dragon capsule and its four explorers shortly after splashdown. Inside the capsule were astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams, Butch Wilmore, and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, who splashed down off the coast of Florida at 5:57pm ET (2127 UTC) on March 18, 2025, concluding their scientific mission to the International Space Station. See Crew-9 return from deorbit to splashdown in this video. (The dolphins appear at 1:33:56.)

Stars Make Firework Supplies!

The next time you see fireworks, take a moment to celebrate the cosmic pyrotechnics that made them possible. From the oxygen and potassium that help fireworks burn to the aluminum that makes sparklers sparkle, most of the elements in the universe wouldn’t be here without stars.

From the time the universe was only a few minutes old until it was about 400 million years old, the cosmos was made of just hydrogen, helium and a teensy bit of lithium. It took some stellar activity to produce the rest of the elements!

Stars are element factories

Even after more than 13 billion years, the hydrogen and helium that formed soon after the big bang still make up over 90 percent of the atoms in the cosmos. Most of the other elements come from stars.

Stars began popping into the universe about 400 million years after the big bang. That sounds like a long time, but it’s only about 3% of the universe’s current age!

Our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will study the universe’s early days to help us learn more about how we went from a hot, soupy sea of atoms to the bigger cosmic structures we see today. We know hydrogen and helium atoms gravitated together to form stars, where atoms could fuse together to make new elements, but we're not sure when it began happening. Roman will help us find out.

The central parts of atoms, called nuclei, are super antisocial – it takes a lot of heat and pressure to force them close together. Strong gravity in the fiery cores of the first stars provided just the right conditions for hydrogen and helium atoms to combine to form more elements and generate energy. The same process continues today in stars like our Sun and provides some special firework supplies.

Carbon makes fireworks explode, helps launch them into the sky, and is even an ingredient in the “black snakes” that seem to grow out of tiny pellets. Fireworks glow pink with help from the element lithium. Both of these elements are created by average, Sun-like stars as they cycle from normal stars to red giants to white dwarfs.

Eventually stars release their elements into the cosmos, where they can be recycled into later generations of stars and planets. Sometimes they encounter cosmic rays, which are nuclei that have been boosted to high speed by the most energetic events in the universe. When cosmic rays collide with atoms, the impact can break them apart, forming simpler elements. That’s how we get boron, which can make fireworks green, and beryllium, which can make them silver or white!

Since massive stars have even stronger gravity in their cores, they can fuse more elements – all the way up to iron. (The process stops there because instead of producing energy, fusing iron is so hard to do that it uses up energy.)

That means the sodium that makes fireworks yellow, the aluminum that produces silver sparks (like in sparklers), and even the oxygen that helps fireworks ignite were all first made in stars, too! A lot of these more complex elements that we take for granted are actually pretty rare throughout the cosmos, adding up to less than 10 percent of the atoms in the universe combined!

Fusion in stars only got us through iron on the periodic table, so where do the rest of our elements come from? It’s what happens next in massive stars that produces some of the even more exotic elements.

Dying stars make elements too!

Once a star many times the Sun’s mass burns through its fuel, gravity is no longer held in check, and its core collapses under its own weight. There, atoms are crushed extremely close together – and they don’t like that! Eventually it reaches a breaking point and the star explodes as a brilliant supernova. Talk about fireworks! These exploding stars make elements like copper, which makes fireworks blue, and zinc, which creates a smoky effect.

Something similar can happen when a white dwarf star – the small, dense core left behind after a Sun-like star runs out of fuel – steals material from a neighboring star. These white dwarfs can explode as supernovae too, spewing elements like the calcium that makes fireworks orange into the cosmos.

When stars collide

White dwarfs aren’t the only “dead” stars that can shower their surroundings with new elements. Stars that are too massive to leave behind white dwarfs but not massive enough to create black holes end up as neutron stars.

If two of these extremely dense stellar skeletons collide, they can produce all kinds of elements, including the barium that makes fireworks bright green and the antimony that creates a glitter effect. Reading this on a phone or computer? You can thank crashing dead stars for some of the metals that make up your device, too!

As for most of the remaining elements we know of, we've only seen them in labs on Earth so far.

Sounds like we’ve got it all figured out, right? But there are still lots of open questions. Our Roman Space Telescope will help us learn more about how elements were created and distributed throughout galaxies. That’s important because the right materials had to come together to form the air we breathe, our bodies, the planet we live on, and yes – even fireworks!

So when you’re watching fireworks, think about their cosmic origins!

Learn more about the Roman Space Telescope at: https://roman.gsfc.nasa.gov/

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A Hitchhiker’s Ride to Space

This month, we are set to launch the latest weather satellite from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The Joint Polar Satellite System-1, or JPSS-1, satellite will provide essential data for timely and accurate weather forecasts and for tracking environmental events such as forest fires and droughts.

Image Credit: Ball Aerospace

JPSS-1 is the primary satellite launching, but four tiny satellites will also be hitchhiking a ride into Earth orbit. These shoebox-sized satellites (part of our CubeSat Launch Initiative) were developed in partnership with university students and used for education, research and development. Here are 4 reasons why MiRaTA, one of the hitchhikers, is particularly interesting…

Miniaturized Weather Satellite Technology

The Microwave Radiometer Technology Acceleration (MiRaTA) CubeSat is set to orbit the Earth to prove that a small satellite can advance the technology necessary to reduce the cost and size of future weather satellites. At less than 10 pounds, these nanosatellites are faster and more cost-effective to build and launch since they have been constructed by Principal Investigator Kerri Cahoy’s students at MIT Lincoln Laboratory (with lots of help). There’s even a chance it could be put into operation with forecasters.

The Antenna? It’s a Measuring Tape

That long skinny piece coming out of the bottom right side under MiRaTA’s solar panel? That’s a measuring tape. It’s doubling as a communications antenna. MiRaTA will measure temperature, water vapor and cloud ice in Earth’s atmosphere. These measurements are used to track major storms, including hurricanes, as well as everyday weather. If this test flight is successful, the new, smaller technology will likely be incorporated into future weather satellites – part of our national infrastructure.

Tiny Package Packing a Punch MiRaTA will also test a new technique using radio signals received from GPS satellites in a higher orbit. They will be used to measure the temperature of the same volume of atmosphere that the radiometer is viewing. The GPS satellite measurement can then be used for calibrating the radiometer. “In physics class, you learn that a pencil submerged in water looks like it’s broken in half because light bends differently in the water than in the air,” Principal Investigator Kerri Cahoy said. “Radio waves are like light in that they refract when they go through changing densities of air, and we can use the magnitude of the refraction to calculate the temperature of the surrounding atmosphere with near-perfect accuracy and use this to calibrate a radiometer.” 

What’s Next?

In the best-case scenario, three weeks after launch MiRaTA will be fully operational, and within three months the team will have obtained enough data to study if this technology concept is working. The big goal for the mission—declaring the technology demonstration a success—would be confirmed a bit farther down the road, at least half a year away, following the data analysis. If MiRaTA’s technology validation is successful, Cahoy said she envisions an eventual constellation of these CubeSats orbiting the entire Earth, taking snapshots of the atmosphere and weather every 15 minutes—frequent enough to track storms, from blizzards to hurricanes, in real time.

Learn more about MiRaTA

Watch the launch!

The mission is scheduled to launch this month (no sooner than Nov. 14), with JPSS-1 atop a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Delta II rocket lifting off from Space Launch Complex 2 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. You’ll be able to watch on NASA TV or at nasa.gov/live.

Watch the launch live HERE on Nov. 14, liftoff is scheduled for Tuesday, 4:47 a.m.! 

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Throwback Thursday: Frequently Asked Questions about Apollo

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, we’ll be sharing answers to some frequently asked questions about the first time humans voyaged to the Moon. Answers have been compiled from archivists in the NASA History Office.

How many people worked on the Apollo program?

At the height of Apollo in 1965, about 409,900 people worked on some aspect of the program, but that number doesn’t capture it all.

It doesn’t represent the people who worked on mission concepts or spacecraft design, such as the engineers who did the wind tunnel testing of the Apollo Command Module and then moved on to other projects. The number also doesn’t represent the NASA astronauts, mission controllers, remote communications personnel, etc. who would have transferred to the Apollo program only after the end of Gemini program (1966-1967). There were still others who worked on the program only part-time or served on temporary committees. In the image above are three technicians studying an Apollo 14 Moon rock in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at Johnson Space Center. From left to right, they are Linda Tyler, Nancy Trent and Sandra Richards.

How many people have walked on the Moon so far?

This artwork portrait done by spaceflight historian Ed Hengeveld depicts the 12 people who have walked on the Moon so far. In all, 24 people have flown to the Moon and three of them, John Young, Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan, have made the journey twice.  

But these numbers will increase.

Are the U.S. flags that were planted on the Moon still standing?

Every successful Apollo lunar landing mission left a flag on the Moon but we don’t know yet whether all are still standing. Some flags were set up very close to the Lunar Module and were in the blast radius of its ascent engine, so it’s possible that some of them could have been knocked down. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin both reported that the flag had been knocked down following their ascent. 

Our Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter took photographs of all the Apollo lunar landing sites. In the case of the Apollo 17 site, you can see the shadow of the upright flag.

But why does it look like it’s waving?

The flags appear to “wave” or “flap” but actually they’re swinging. Swinging motions on Earth are dampened due to gravity and air resistance, but on the Moon any swinging motion can continue for much longer. Once the flags settled (and were clear of the ascent stage exhaust), they remained still.  And how is the flag hanging? Before launching, workers on the ground had attached a horizontal rod to the top of each flag for support, allowing it to be visible in pictures and television broadcasts to the American public. Armstrong and Aldrin did not fully extend the rod once they were on the Moon, giving the flag a ripple effect. The other astronauts liked the ripple effect so much that they also did not completely extend the rod. 

Why don’t we see stars in any of the pictures?

Have you ever taken a photo of the night sky with your phone or camera? You likely won’t see any stars because your camera’s settings are likely set to short exposure time which only lets it quickly take in the light off the bright objects closest to you. It’s the same reason you generally don’t see stars in spacewalk pictures from the International Space Station. There’s no use for longer exposure times to get an image like this one of Bruce McCandless in 1984 as seen from Space Shuttle Challenger (STS-41B).

The Hasselblad cameras that Apollo astronauts flew with were almost always set to short exposure times. And why didn’t the astronauts photograph the stars? Well, they were busy exploring the Moon!

When are we going back to the Moon?

The first giant leap was only the beginning. Work is under way to send the first woman and the next man to the Moon in five years. As we prepare to launch the next era of exploration, the new Artemis program is the first step in humanity’s presence on the Moon and beyond.

Keep checking back for more answers to Apollo FAQs.

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Solar System: Things to Know This Week

It’s the time of year for summer break, swimming, and oh, yes storms. June 1 marks the beginning of hurricane season on the Atlantic coast, but we’re not alone. Our neighboring planets have seen their fair share of volatile weather, too (like the Cassini spacecraft’s view of the unique six-sided jet stream at Saturn’s north pole known as “the hexagon”). 

This week, we present 10 of the solar system’s greatest storms.

1. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot

With tumultuous winds peaking at 400 mph, the Great Red Spot has been swirling wildly over Jupiter’s skies for at least 150 years and possibly much longer. People saw a big spot on Jupiter as early as the 1600s when they started stargazing through telescopes, though it’s unclear whether they were looking at a different storm. Today, scientists know the Great Red Spot has been there for a while, but what causes its swirl of reddish hues remains to be discovered. More >

2. Jupiter’s Little Red Spot

Despite its unofficial name, the Little Red Spot is about as wide as Earth. The storm reached its current size when three smaller spots collided and merged in the year 2000. More >

3. Saturn’s Hexagon

The planet’s rings might get most of the glory, but another shape’s been competing for attention: the hexagon. This jet stream is home to a massive hurricane tightly centered on the north pole, with an eye about 50 times larger than the average hurricane eye on Earth. Numerous small vortices spin clockwise while the hexagon and hurricane spin counterclockwise. The biggest of these vortices, seen near the lower right corner of the hexagon and appearing whitish, spans about 2,200 miles, approximately twice the size of the largest hurricane on Earth. More>

4. Monster Storm on Saturn 

A tempest erupted in 2010, extending approximately 9,000 miles north-south large enough to eventually eat its own tail before petering out. The storm raged for 200 days, making it the longest-lasting, planet-encircling storm ever seen on Saturn. More >

5. Mars’ Dust Storm 

Better cover your eyes. Dust storms are a frequent guest on the Red Planet, but one dust storm in 2001 larger by far than any seen on Earth raised a cloud of dust that engulfed the entire planet for three months. As the Sun warmed the airborne dust, the upper atmospheric temperature rose by about 80 degrees Fahrenheit. More >

6. Neptune’s Great Dark Spot

Several large, dark spots on Neptune are similar to Jupiter’s hurricane-like storms. The largest spot, named the “Great Dark Spot” by its discoverers, contains a storm big enough for Earth to fit neatly inside. And, it looks to be an anticyclone similar to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. More >

7. Sun Twister 

Not to be confused with Earth’s tornadoes, a stalk-like prominence rose up above the Sun, then split into about four strands that twisted themselves into a knot and dispersed over a two-hour period. This close-up shows the effect is one of airy gracefulness. More >

8. Titan’s Arrow-shaped Storm 

The storm blew across the equatorial region of Titan, creating large effects in the form of dark and likely “wet” from liquid hydrocarbons areas on the surface of the moon. The part of the storm visible here measures 750 miles in length east-to-west. The wings of the storm that trail off to the northwest and southwest from the easternmost point of the storm are each 930 miles long. More >

9. Geomagnetic Storms

On March 9, 1989, a huge cloud of solar material exploded from the sun, twisting toward Earth. When this cloud of magnetized solar material called a coronal mass ejection reached our planet, it set off a chain of events in near-Earth space that ultimately knocked out an entire power grid area to the Canadian province Quebec for nine hours. More >

10. Super Typhoon Tip

Back on Earth, Typhoon Tip of 1979 remains the biggest storm to ever hit our planet, making landfall in Japan. The tropical cyclone saw sustained winds peak at 190 mph and the diameter of circulation spanned approximately 1,380 miles. Fortunately, we now have plans to better predict future storms on Earth. NASA recently launched a new fleet of hurricane-tracking satellites, known as the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS), which will use the same GPS technology you and I use in our cars to measure wind speed and ultimately improve how to track and forecast hurricanes. More >

Discover more lists of 10 things to know about our solar system HERE.

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Why is the final phase so difficult?Sorry if I sound dumb,I'm just curious.Also,what will be the rover's first task after landing?

Our Most “Liked” Instagram Posts of 2016

Our Instagram page has over 1,800 images and is lucky enough to be followed by more than 18 million fans.

What images and videos were your favorite from this past year? Great question, and one we asked ourselves too! 

Here’s a look at our most liked Instagram posts* of 2016…Enjoy!

#10

Colorful “last hurrah’ of a star: The Hubble Space Telescope shows off the colorful “last hurrah” of a star like our sun. The star is ending its life by casting off its outer layers of gas, which formed a cocoon around the star’s remaining core. With 513,672 likes, this image is our 10th most liked of 2016.

#9

Vivid glowing auroras in Jupiter’s atmosphere! Astronomers are using the Hubble Space Telescope to study auroras – stunning light shows in a planet’s atmosphere – on the poles of the largest planet in the solar system. This image ranks #9 for 2016 with 515,339 likes.

#8

Astronomers found evidence for what is likely one of the most extreme pulsars, or rotating neutron stars, ever detected. The source exhibits properties of a highly magnetized neutron star, or magnetar, yet its deduced spin period is thousands of times longer than any pulsar ever observed. With 517,995 likes, this picture ranks #8 for 2016.

#7

Fiery South Atlantic Sunset! An astronaut aboard the International Space Station photographed a sunset that looks like a vast sheet of flame. With Earth’s surface already in darkness, the setting sun, the cloud masses, and the sideways viewing angle make a powerful image of the kind that astronauts use to commemorate their flights. This image ranks #7 for 2016 with 520,553 likes.

#6

Go floating! Join us for a fly-through of the International Space Station! This footage was shot using a fisheye lens for extreme focus and depth of field. This video ranks as our sixth most liked Instagram post of 2016 with 541,418 likes.

#5

This #BlackFriday post helped us celebrate our 4th annual #BlackHoleFriday! Each year we pose awesome content about black holes on the Black Friday shopping holiday. A black hole is a place in space where gravity pulls so much that even light cannot get out. With 549,910 likes, this image ranks #5 for 2016.

#4

A cluster of young stars – about one to two million years old – located about 20,000 light years from Earth. Data in visible light from the Hubble Space Telescope (green and blue) reveal thick clouds where the stars are forming. This image ranks #4 for 2016 with 573,002 likes.

#3

Supermoon is a spectacular sight! The Nov. 14 supermoon was especially “super” because it was the closest full moon to Earth since 1948. We won’t see another supermoon like this until 2034. Which might have something to do with this image ranking #3 for 2016 with 695,343 likes.

#2

Supermoon seen from space! Aboard the International Space Station, NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson posted this image on Dec. 14 captured by European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet. This stunning image ranks #2 for 2016 with 704,530 likes.

#1

It’s a bird, it’s a plane…no, it’s a #supermoon! The moon, or supermoon, is seen rising behind the Soyuz rocket at the Baikonur Cosmodrome launch pad in Kazakhstan ahead of the November crew launch to the International Space Station. This photo was our #1 image of 2016 with 746,981 likes.

Thanks for joining us as we traveled through the space events of 2016. We’re looking forward to all of the interstellar fun that 2017 will bring. Happy Holidays!

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*Posts and rankings are were taken as of Dec. 21, 2016.

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