27. Astrophysicist, writer, artist. Michigan. Business inquiries: kaijunobiz@gmail.com
The moon handing us its resume to become a planet:
NASA astronaut films lightning from ISS
Astronaut Reid Wiseman posted a Vine from the International Space Station today showing lightning over Houston.
Tornado warnings were issued in the Houston area earlier this afternoon but have since expired.
got me having goosebumps
he. he posted a vine. from space.
To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before
Whether and when NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, humankind’s most distant object, broke through to interstellar space, the space between stars, has been a thorny issue. For the last year, claims have surfaced every few months that Voyager 1 has “left our solar system”.
Voyager 1 is exploring an even more unfamiliar place than our Earth’s sea floors — a place more than 11 billion miles (17 billion kilometers) away from our sun. It has been sending back so much unexpected data that the science team has been grappling with the question of how to explain all the information. None of the handful of models the Voyager team uses as blueprints have accounted for the observations about the transition between our heliosphere and the interstellar medium in detail. The team has known it might take months, or longer, to understand the data fully and draw their conclusions.
Since the 1960s, most scientists have defined our solar system as going out to the Oort Cloud, where the comets that swing by our sun on long timescales originate. That area is where the gravity of other stars begins to dominate that of the sun. It will take about 300 years for Voyager 1 to reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud and possibly about 30,000 years to fly beyond it. Informally, of course, “solar system” typically means the planetary neighborhood around our sun. Because of this ambiguity, the Voyager team has lately favored talking about interstellar space, which is specifically the space between each star’s realm of plasma influence.
Voyager 1, which is working with a finite power supply, has enough electrical power to keep operating the fields and particles science instruments through at least 2020, which will mark 43 years of continual operation. At that point, mission managers will have to start turning off these instruments one by one to conserve power, with the last one turning off around 2025.
The spacecraft will continue sending engineering data for a few more years after the last science instrument is turned off, but after that it will be sailing on as a silent ambassador. In about 40,000 years, it will be closer to the star AC +79 3888 than our own sun. (AC +79 3888 is traveling toward us faster than we are traveling towards it, so while Alpha Centauri is the next closest star now, it won’t be in 40,000 years.) And for the rest of time, Voyager 1 will continue orbiting around the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, with our sun but a tiny point of light among many.
For more information about Voyager, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/voyager and http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov.
so nasa opened up applications to be an astronaut and all u have to have is a degree in the “right” field like ok nasa i see how it is u think an english lit major cant go to space well then tell me whos gonna analyze homoerotic subtext in space??? i kno theres homoerotic subtext in space ive seen star wars AND star trek
This is Kjell Lindgren. He’s a NASA astronaut who just got back from 5 months on the International Space Station. There are two reasons why this picture is hilarious:
tl;dr NASA employs a bunch of fucking nerds
The victims of the 1986 Challenger Shuttle explosion likely did not die on initial failure of the rocket, but instead were probably alive and conscious until their fuselage crashed into the ocean some time later. Six astronauts and one civilian schoolteacher died.
The failure was due to malfunctioning O-Rings, a known problem to both NASA and the contractor hired to build the shuttle. Several NASA engineers warned against the launch and were concerned about the integrity of said O-Rings. Several chief engineers, most notably Roger Boisjoly, pleaded for the launch to be rescheduled, but was ignored by the administration.
30 Doradus, located in the heart of the Tarantula nebula, is the brightest star-forming region in our galactic neighborhood. It is home to several million young stars; among which live the most massive stars ever seen. The nebula resides 170,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small, satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. No known star-forming region in our galaxy is as large or as prolific as 30 Doradus.
Anonymous asked:
God SAME
Photos of Jupiter taken by NASA’s JUNO probe
God I’m so gay for Jupiter
Can we talk about the Valentine’s Day cards NASA made?
Today marks 25 years since NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft saw Earth as “a pale blue dot.”
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” -Carl Sagan
