aamir1056

Episode 1: Follow two NASA rocket teams as they launch from Australia to study our nearest stellar neighbors – Alpha Centauri A & B – on a quest to understand how stars make the planets around them suitable for life.

There are likely billions of planets in our galaxy. With over 5,000 already confirmed, how do we know which ones might hold life? Two NASA sounding rockets are launching from Australia to find out which stars make for habitable hosts. We’re following these rocket teams Down Under to show you what it takes to launch a rocket and make groundbreaking scientific measurements. Hang on tight – we’re going on an adventure High Above Down Under! Episodes released weekly starting June 27, 2023. Music credit: “Epic Earth” by Andy Hopkins (PRS), Dean Mahoney (PRS), Jacob Nicholas Stonewall Jackson (PRS) via Universal Production Music Credit NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Host: Miles Hatfield (NASA/GSFC)

Description: On Oct. 14, 2023, an annular solar eclipse will cross North, Central, and South America. Visible in parts of the United States, Mexico, and many countries in South and Central America, millions of people in the Western Hemisphere can experience this eclipse. But what is an annular eclipse? Why does it happen? And why does it create a “ring of fire” in the sky?

A young planet whirling around a petulant red dwarf star is changing in unpredictable ways orbit-by-orbit. It is so close to its parent star that it experiences a consistent, torrential blast of energy, which evaporates its hydrogen atmosphere – causing it to puff off the planet. But during one orbit observed with the Hubble Space Telescope, the planet looked like it wasn’t losing any material at all, while an orbit observed with Hubble a year and a half later showed clear signs of atmospheric loss.

NASA and NOAA’s STAQS campaign is taking to the skies and ground this summer to support TEMPO satellite data. Scientists will compare the air quality data they measure from planes with what TEMPO measures from orbit, making both measurements better. Music credit: “Game Night Instrumental Wong” from Universal Production Music

From forest floor to space, NASA scientists and collaborators are advancing tools and methods to predict, remotely detect, and ultimately mitigate wildfires. That process starts with understanding fire behavior, tracking them with satellites, and getting that data in the hands of land managers and communities facing record-breaking fire seasons. Universal Production Music: Big Found by Ran Shir [BMI], Rotem Moav [BMI]; Swirling Blizzard by Laurent Dury [SACEM]; Dry Ice by Alessandro Rizzo [PRS], Elliot Greenway Ireland [PRS], Paper Boy [PRS]; Into Motion by Peter Larsen [PRS

In October 2023, NASA is launching the Heliophysics Big Year – a global celebration of solar science and the Sun’s influence on Earth, our solar system, and beyond. Modeled after the “Big Year” concept from citizen scientists in the bird-watching community, the Heliophysics Big Year challenges everyone to get involved with fun Sun-related activities.

On July 20, 2015, NASA released to the world the first image of the sunlit side of Earth captured by the space agency's EPIC camera on NOAA's DSCOVR satellite. The camera has now recorded a full year of life on Earth from its orbit at Lagrange point 1, approximately 1 million miles from Earth, where it is balanced between the gravity of our home planet and the sun. EPIC takes a new picture every two hours, revealing how the planet would look to human eyes, capturing the ever-changing motion of clouds and weather systems and the fixed features of Earth such as deserts, forests and the distinct blues of different seas. EPIC will allow scientists to monitor ozone and aerosol levels in Earth’s atmosphere, cloud height, vegetation properties and the ultraviolet reflectivity of Earth. The primary objective of DSCOVR, a partnership between NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Air Force, is to maintain the nation’s real-time solar wind monitoring capabilities, which are critical to the accuracy and lead time of space weather alerts and forecasts from NOAA.

A number of people who've seen NASA's annual lunar phase and libration videos have asked what the other side of the Moon looks like, the side that can't be seen from the Earth. This video answers that question. The imagery was created using Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data.

From year to year, the moon never seems to change. Craters and other formations appear to be permanent now, but the moon didn't always look like this. Thanks to NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, we now have a better look at some of the moon's history. Learn more in this video!

This view of Earth at night is a cloud-free view from space as acquired by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership Satellite (Suomi NPP). A joint program by NASA and NOAA, Suomi NPP captured this nighttime image by the satellite's Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). The day-night band on VIIRS detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe signals such as city lights, gas flares, and wildfires. This new image is a composite of data acquired over nine days in April and thirteen days in October 2012. It took 312 satellite orbits and 2.5 terabytes of data to get a clear shot of every parcel of land surface.

This video uses data gathered from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft to recreate some of the stunning views of the Moon that the Apollo 13 astronauts saw on their perilous journey around the farside in 1970. These visualizations, in 4K resolution, depict many different views of the lunar surface, starting with earthset and sunrise and concluding with the time Apollo 13 reestablished radio contact with Mission Control. Also depicted is the path of the free return trajectory around the Moon, and a continuous view of the Moon throughout that path. All views have been sped up for timing purposes — they are not shown in "real-time."

Editor’s Note: A previous version of this video mislabeled the orbit of Saturn as the orbit of Jupiter. This new NASA animation highlights the “super” in supermassive black holes. These monsters lurk in the centers of most big galaxies, including our own Milky Way, and contain between 100,000 and tens of billions of times more mass than our Sun. Any light crossing the event horizon – the black hole’s point of no return – becomes trapped forever, and any light passing close to it is redirected by the black hole’s intense gravity. Together, these effects produce a “shadow” about twice the size of the black hole’s actual event horizon. The animation shows 10 supersized black holes that occupy center stage in their host galaxies, including the Milky Way and M87, scaled by the sizes of their shadows. Starting near the Sun, the camera steadily pulls back to compare ever-larger black holes to different structures in our solar system. First up is 1601+3113, a dwarf galaxy hosting a black hole packed with the mass of 100,000 Suns. The matter is so compressed that even the black hole’s shadow is smaller than our Sun. The black hole at the heart of our own galaxy, called Sagittarius A* (pronounced ay-star), boasts the weight of 4.3 million Suns based on long-term tracking of stars in orbit around it. It’s shadow diameter spans about half that of Mercury’s orbit in our solar system. The animation shows two monster black holes in the galaxy known as NGC 7727. Located about 1,600 light-years apart, one weighs 6 million solar masses and the other more than 150 million Suns. Astronomers say the pair will merge within the next 250 million years. At the animation’s larger scale lies M87’s black hole, now with a updated mass of 5.4 billion Suns. Its shadow is so big that even a beam of light – traveling at 670 million mph (1 billion kph) – would take about two and a half days to cross it. The movie ends with TON 618, one of a handful of extremely distant and massive black holes for which astronomers have direct measurements. This behemoth contains more than 60 billion solar masses, and it boasts a shadow so large that a beam of light would take weeks to traverse it. Music credit: "In the Stars" from Universal Production Music Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab Lead Producer: Scott Wiessinger (KBRwyle) Lead Animator: Krystofer Kim (KBRwyle) Lead Science writer: Francis Reddy (University of Maryland College Park) Visualizer: Jeremy Schnittman (NASA/GSFC) Producer: Sophia Roberts (AIMM) Scientist: Jeremy Schnittman (NASA/GSFC)