Image (Credit): Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket at Launch Complex 1 in Mahia, New Zealand. (NASA)
On Sunday, the TROPICS mission was successfully launched after an earlier delay. The Rocket Lab Electron launch took place in New Zealand and involved two small CubeSats tasked with monitoring deadly storms. This is the first pair to be launched, with a total of four satellites planned to accomplish the TROPICS mission.
And yes, TROPICS is an acronym (fortunately) for Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats. And you thought the Congress was going crazy with its acronyms for legislation.
Image (Credit): NGC 5283, as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, with its active galactic nucleus, which is at the heart of a galaxy where a supermassive black hole exists. (NASA, ESA, A. Barth (University of California – Irvine), and M. Revalski (STScI); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
Yes, I know. This is too many celebrations over an eight-day period, starting with Astronomy Day last Saturday. But who cannot be excited by Black Hole Week?
If you missed the various NASA-sponsored events over the past week, you can find them here.
Check out the presentation of the largest black holes from Monday’s presentation. It puts it all into very scary perspective.
And you can learn plenty more about black holes by visiting this NASA page.
“We built the International Space Station with the Russians. What a contrast, with the Chinese government,…They are secretive, they are non-transparent. They will not share when Earth is threatened by one of their tumbling rockets coming back in, they will not share their trajectories, so it’s a huge difference in the way we approach our civilian space program with the Russians visa vie the Chinese.”
Image (Credit): The Hubble Space Telescope orbits with Earth in the background. (NASA)
On this day in 1990, NASA’s Space Shuttle Discovery launched the Hubble Space Telescope. We do not think of the shuttles anymore as we discuss reusable rockets, but the shuttles were the first reusable spacecraft-launching vehicles.
After some initial problems, the Hubble became a critical component in the exploration of the universe. Some of the telescope’s amazing images are shown below.
It is still going strong, even though its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), is the more powerful of the two. Launched in late 2021, the JWST has expanded on some of Hubble’s earlier work. The pair are a powerful team.
Hubble has made more than 1.5 million observations since its mission began in 1990.
Astronomers using Hubble data have published more than 19,000 scientific papers, making it one of the most productive scientific instruments ever built. Those papers have been cited in other papers over 1.1 million times.
Hubble has no thrusters. To change angles, it uses Newton’s third law by spinning its wheels in the opposite direction. It turns at about the speed of a minute hand on a clock, taking 15 minutes to turn 90 degrees.
Hubble has peered back into the very distant past, to locations more than 13.4 billion light-years from Earth.
Hubble’s mirror is about 7.9 feet (2.4 m) across. It was so finely polished that if you scaled it to be the diameter of the Earth, you would not find a bump more than 6 inches (15 cm) tall.
Image (Credit): The Carina Nebula. (NASA, ESA, N. Smith (University of California, Berkeley), and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Image (Credit): NGC 3603. (NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration)
Image (Credit): The Horsehead Nebula, otherwise known as Barnard 33. (NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI))
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured a stunning “smash-up” of two spiral galaxies. Collectively called Arp 220, the collision of the pair of galaxies has facilitated massive star formation. Arp 220 is located within the constellation Serpens, about 250 million light-years from Earth. Arp 220 gets its namesake because it is the 220th object in Hallton Art’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. Arp 220 is “peculiar” because it’s an ultra-luminous infrared galaxy (ULIRG), and the nearest ULIRG to Earth.
Now in its fifth year in space, NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) remains a rousing success. TESS’s cameras have mapped more than 93% of the entire sky, discovered 329 new worlds and thousands more candidates, and provided new insights into a wide array of cosmic phenomena, from stellar pulsations and exploding stars to supermassive black holes.
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter has completed its 50th flight on Mars. The first aircraft on another world reached the half-century mark on April 13, traveling over 1,057.09 feet (322.2 meters) in 145.7 seconds. The helicopter also achieved a new altitude record of 59 feet (18 meters) before alighting near the half-mile-wide (800-meter-wide) “Belva Crater.”
Our Awesome Universe 