NASA has the absolute best resources on the web for pictures of space. We write so many articles about space here on Universe Today, so we’ve learned all the best places to look to get the latest and greatest NASA pictures.
Before we go right to some sites, here’s a general tip that you can use when you’re looking for NASA pictures. Use Google, but have it search for images within NASA’s sites. For example, let’s say that you’re looking for an astronomy picture of Mars, but you want it to be a NASA image. Search in Google for: mars picture site:nasa.gov. You can also switch over to the images tab and see lots and lots of images from NASA. You should be able to find the one you’re looking for.
Perhaps the best place to start is NASA’s Featured Images and Galleries. This is linked from the main NASA page and features current pictures as well as classics from the past. It also links you to other NASA image gallery sites.
Another classic is the Astronomy Picture of the Day. Keep in mind that although it’s endorsed by NASA, the pictures featured in Astronomy Picture of the Day are owned and copyright by the original photographers. So you can’t just use their pictures without asking permission first.
There’s a fairly new service out called NASA Images. It’s got a huge catalog of NASA pictures, with cool tools that let you organize and download your favorites.
The NASA Image Exchange is a huge database of NASA pictures. You can search by object, or by spacecraft and use other constraints to find the exact image you’re looking for.
The Johnson Digital Image Collection has photographs from all of NASA’s human spaceflight, from the original Mercury and Gemini flights, though the Apollo landings, right up until the space shuttle missions.
We have also recorded many episodes of Astronomy Cast about space, and we talk about NASA pictures all the time. Listen to this, Episode 88: The Hubble Space Telescope.
Buzz Lightyear returns from 15 months in the ISS. Credit: NASA. Click for larger image.
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Buzz Lightyear, that is. The action figure returned from space on Sept. 11, aboard space shuttle Discovery’s STS-128 mission after 15 months aboard the International Space Station. Word has it that Disney is quite excited about his return, and will give him a ticker-tape parade on October 2, along with some of his his space station crewmates and the original Buzz, Apollo 11’s Buzz Aldrin, at Walt Disney World in Florida.
So what was Buzz doing on the ISS?
While in space Buzz supported NASA’s education outreach program — STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics)–by creating a series of fun educational online outreach programs. Following his return, Disney is partnering with NASA to create a new online educational game and an online mission patch competition for school kids across America. NASA will fly the winning patch in space. In addition, NASA plans to announce on Oct. 2, 2009, the details of a new exciting educational competition that will give students the opportunity to design an experiment for the astronauts on the space station.
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The International Space Station, or ISS, is the largest object every built by humans in space. And because it’s so large, it’s also very bright; easily visible with the unaided eye. The ISS also follows an orbital track that takes over different parts of the Earth. That means if you know the right time, you can go out and watch the station pass right over. But you need to know the right time, and that requires some kind of ISS tracking tool. Let’s take a look at some ISS tracking tools you can use to tell you when you should head outside and look up.
The best place to track ISS is from NASA’s human space flight ISS tracking page. This site will tell you the current location of the International Space Station, and space shuttles currently in flight, and the Hubble Space Telescope. The problem is that this tells you where the space station is right now, and not when it’s going to be passing through your skies… at night.
A better tool for that is the ISS sightings page. You download an applet that lets you put in your place on Earth and it gives you some upcoming dates and times that the station will be passing overhead. There’s also a quick drop down box, where you can select your location from many places in the world.
Another great tool is Heavens Above. It allows you to track the current position of thousands of satellites, including ISS and the space shuttles, when they’re in orbit.
So use one of these tools for ISS tracking, and then head outside and see if you can see the station with your own eyes.
Artist concept of Chandrayaan-1 orbiting the moon. Credit: ISRO
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After giving up on re-establishing contact with the Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter, Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Chairman G. Madhavan Nair announced the space agency hopes to launch its first mission to Mars sometime between 2013 and 2015. Nair said the termination of Chandrayaan-1, although sad, is not a setback and India will move ahead with its plans for the Chandrayaan-2 mission to land an unmanned rover on the moon’s surface to prospect for chemicals, and in four to six years launch a robotic mission to Mars.
“We have given a call for proposal to different scientific communities,” Nair told reporters. “Depending on the type of experiments they propose, we will be able to plan the mission. The mission is at conceptual stage and will be taken up after Chandrayaan-2.”
On the decision to quickly pull the plug on Chandrayaan-1, Nair said, “There was no possibility of retrieving it. (But) it was a great success. We could collect a large volume of data, including more than 70,000 images of the moon. In that sense, 95 percent of the objective was completed.”
Contact with Chandrayaan-1 may have been lost because its antenna rotated out of direct contact with Earth, ISRO officials said. Earlier this year, the spacecraft lost both its primary and back-up star sensors, which use the positions of stars to orient the spacecraft.
The loss of Chandrayaan-1 comes less than a week after the spacecraft’s orbit was adjusted to team up with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter for a Bi-static radar experiment. During the maneuver, Chandrayaan-1 fired its radar beam into Erlanger Crater on the moon’s north pole. Both spacecraft listened for echoes that might indicate the presence of water ice – a precious resource for future lunar explorers. The results of that experiment have not yet been released.
Chandrayaan-1 craft was designed to orbit the moon for two years, but lasted 315 days. It will take about 1,000 days until it crashes to the lunar surface and is being tracked by the U.S. and Russia, ISRO said.
The Chandrayaan I had 11 payloads, including a terrain-mapping camera designed to create a three-dimensional atlas of the moon. It is also carrying mapping instruments for the European Space Agency, radiation-measuring equipment for the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and two devices for NASA, including the radar instrument to assess mineral composition and look for ice deposits. India launched its first rocket in 1963 and first satellite in 1975. The country’s satellite program is one of the largest communication systems in the world.
Garver and Bolden after they were sworn into office. Credit: NASA
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Steely-eyed missile men may still be a part of NASA, but the space agency’s newly sworn-in administrator says he is an unabashed hugger and admits to crying easily. “One more thing you’ll learn about me, I cry,” said Charlie Bolden at an all-hands video meeting with the NASA centers. “I think it’s important to be passionate.” Bolden’s Deputy Administrator Lori Garver said she’s a hugger, too and as Bolden and Garver hugged on stage, Garver exclaimed, “Feelings are not something that were popular in the last few years at NASA, but they’re back. Feelings are back!”
Garver was obviously referring to former administrator Mike Griffin, who once said, “I don’t do feelings, just think of me as Spock.”
Bolden, a retired Marine Corps general and four-time shuttle astronaut, spoke at length about himself and his hopes for NASA’s future. He asked NASA employees in attendance to raise their hands if they didn’t think NASA should go to Mars. When no one raised their hands, he said, “We all agree we want humans to go to Mars, we don’t agree on how to get there. The challenge is to figure out the most efficient, most cost-effective path to get there. We can’t get there the way we’re doing it right now, with a whole bunch of different people thinking we’ll do a little of that and a little of this. We need to come together with a coherent plan.”
A presidential panel is reviewing options for the NASA’s human space program and is expected to issue its report next month. Bolden told workers the review is “nothing to be afraid of.”
Also, a second review encompassing all areas of space — military, commercial, civil and scientific — is under way by the national security advisor, James Jones, a retired four-star Marine general.
“There needs to be a coherent policy and so President Obama has asked General Jones to put together a group to take a look at the national space policy,” Bolden said.
Bolden said he wants working at NASA to be fun. “I will make mistakes, but I’m going to have fun, and I want all of you (NASA work force) to have fun,” he said. However, he cautioned that working in space is a risky business, and not everything is fun. “NASA is in the news every day and there’s always the potential for it to be bad news when we have people in space.”
Showing that she is in touch with the public’s views of NASA Garver shared some encouraging poll results about public opinion of NASA. Of those polled, 72 per cent have a positive impression of NASA. That’s better than Apple, Garver said, which got only a 63 per cent rating.
“We are more popular than your iPod,” she said.
Both Bolden and Garver said they were incredibly proud to be working at NASA again. “I look forward to working with you all,” Bolden said, “and we have some important things we have to do.”
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Is NASA becoming creative, fun and hip in their old (50 plus) age? They are Tweeting and Facebook-ing like crazy, and also getting quite adept at imaginative promotional images. A new poster for the next Expedition crew for the International Space Station is now available and it has a Star Trek theme. This is a great way for NASA to capitalize on the renewed popularity of Star Trek, while bringing the names of faces of the ISS crews to the public in an enjoyable and entertaining way. This Expedition 21 poster is available in downloadable versions in medium and large files (pdf).
See NASA’s entire collection of mission posters here at NASA’s Spaceflight Awareness page.
Astronaut John Grusnfeld on the recent Hubble servicing mission. Credit: NASA
Why do we explore? In the days of Magellan, Columbus and da Gama, undoubtedly the average person thought it was foolish to risk lives and spend large amounts of money to find out what was beyond the horizon. Those explorers didn’t find what they expected, but their explorations changed the world.
What drives us to explore and discover is what we don’t know, and the spirit of exploration inspires us to create and invent so that we can go explore and possibly change the world. We don’t know yet exactly what we’ll find if humans ever go to Mars, Europa or beyond, but if we stay in our caves we’ll never find out. Similarly, space probes and telescopes like Hubble, as well as ground-based telescopes have helped us explore remotely and have facilitated the discovery of so many things we didn’t know — and didn’t expect — about our universe.
However, exploration takes money.
The most often-used argument against space exploration is that we should use that money to alleviate problems here on Earth. But that argument fails to realize that NASA doesn’t just pack millions of dollar bills into a rocket and blast them into space. The money NASA uses creates jobs, providing an opportunity for some of the world’s brightest minds to use their talents to, yes, actually benefit humanity. NASA’s exploration spurs inventions that we use everyday, many which save lives and improve the quality of life. Plus, we’re expanding our horizons and feeding our curiosity, while learning so, so much and attempting to answer really big questions about ourselves and the cosmos.
NASA’s annual budget for fiscal year 2009 is $17.2 billion. The proposed budget for FY 2010 would raise it to about $18.7 billion. That sounds like a lot of money, and it is, but let’s put it in perspective. The US annual budget is almost $3 trillion and NASA’s cut of the US budget is less than 1%, which isn’t big enough to create even a single line on this pie chart. A few other things to put NASA’s budget in perspective:
Former NASA administrator Mike Griffin mentioned recently that US consumers spend more on pizza ($27 billion) than NASA’s budget. (Head nod to Ian O’Neill)
Miles O’Brien recently brought it to our attention that the amount of money Bernie Maddof scammed with his Ponzi scheme ($50 billion) is way bigger than NASA’s budget.
Americans spend a lot of money on some pretty ridiculous things. Returning to that oft-used phrase about spending the money used in space to solve the problems on Earth, consider this: *
Annually, Americans spend about $88.8 billion on tobacco products and another $97 billion on alcohol. $313 billion is spent each year in America for treatment of tobacco and alcohol related medical problems.
Likewise, people in the US spend about $64 billion on illegal drugs, and $114.2 billion for health-related care of drug use.
Americans also spend $586.5 billion a year on gambling. Italian’s also spend quite a bit – according to Stranieri, in 2011 gamblers in Italy spent more than 100 billion euros on gambling!
It’s possible we could give up some other things to help alleviate the problems in our country without having to give up the spirit of exploration.
*the numbers used here are from various years, depending on what was readily available, but range from the years 2000 and 2008.
Have you heard about Space Lifestyle Magazine? It’s a digital magazine, with a full color layout just like a print magazine, but its all online. And the winter issue of Space Lifestyle Magazine is now online and available for free. SLM has feature articles about all aspects of space — NewSpace, NASA, military, science and astronomy — but mostly it’s about the people that make the space sector tick.
In the latest issue, you’ll find a bang-up article written by UT’s Ian O’Neill about SpaceX. Ian actually toured the SpaceX facility and took some great pictures and wrote a very comprehensive article about SpaceX’s recent successful launch to orbit. Other features include an interesting overview about the work being done to create magnetic shielding for spacecraft that will help repel radiation.
There’s also a feature story about South Korea’s Yecheon Astro Space Center selecting XCOR Aerospace services – specifically their Lynx Mark II suborbital vehicle – as its preferred supplier of suborbital space launch services.
There’s also a comprehensive rundown of the X PRIZE Lunar Lander Challenge competition last fall, and much more including book reviews (Death From the Sky by Phil Plait) and a special discount for the National Space Symposium to be held March 30-April 2 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. If you haven’t already “subscribed” to SLM, please do so for the chance to win a Zero-G parabolic flight and other prizes. Enjoy!
Artist's impression of The Milky Way Galaxy. Based on current estimates and exoplanet data, it is believed that there could be tens of billions of habitable planets out there. Credit: NASA
When you look up into the night sky, it seems like you can see a lot of stars. There are about 2,500 stars visible to the naked eye at any one point in time on the Earth, and 5,800-8,000 total visible stars (i.e. that can be spotted with the aid of binoculars or a telescope). But this is a very tiny fraction of the stars the Milky Way is thought to have!
So the question is, then, exactly how many stars are in the Milky Way Galaxy? Astronomers estimate that there are 100 billion to 400 billion stars contained within our galaxy, though some estimate claim there may be as many as a trillion. The reason for the disparity is because we have a hard time viewing the galaxy, and there’s only so many stars we can be sure are there.
Structure of the Milky Way:
Why can we only see so few of these stars? Well, for starters, our Solar System is located within the disk of the Milky Way, which is a barred spiral galaxy approximately 100,000 light years across. In addition, we are about 30,000 light years from the galactic center, which means there is a lot of distance – and a LOT of stars – between us and the other side of the galaxy.
Artist’s impression of the Milky Way Galaxy. Credit: NASA
To complicate matter further, when astronomers look out at all of these stars, even closer ones that are relatively bright can be washed out by the light of brighter stars behind them. And then there are the faint stars that are at a significant distance from us, but which elude conventional detection because their light source is drowned out by brighter stars or star clusters in their vicinity.
The furthest stars that you can see with your naked eye (with a couple of exceptions) are about 1000 light years away. There are quite a few bright stars in the Milky Way, but clouds of dust and gas – especially those that lie at the galactic center – block visible light. This cloud, which appears as a dim glowing band arching across the night sky – is where our galaxy gets the “milky” in its name from.
It is also the reason why we can only really see the stars in our vicinity, and why those on the other side of the galaxy are hidden from us. To put it all in perspective, imagine you are standing in a very large, very crowded room, and are stuck in the far corner. If someone were to ask you, “how many people are there in here?”, you would have a hard time giving them an accurate figure.
Now imagine that someone brings in a smoke machine and begins filling the center of the room with a thick haze. Not only does it become difficult to see clearly more than a few meters in front of you, but objects on the other side of the room are entirely obscured. Basically, your inability to rise above the crowd and count heads means that you are stuck either making guesses, or estimating based on those that you can see.
A mosaic of the images covering the entire sky as observed by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), part of its All-Sky Data Release. Credit: NASA/JPL
Imaging Methods:
Infrared (heat-sensitive) cameras like the Cosmic Background Explorer (aka. COBE) can see through the gas and dust because infrared light travels through it. And there’s also the Spitzer Space Telescope, an infrared space observatory launched by NASA in 2003; the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), deployed in 2009; and the Herschel Space Observatory, a European Space Agency mission with important NASA participation.
All of these telescopes have been deployed over the past few years for the purpose of examining the universe in the infrared wavelength, so that astronomers will be able to detect stars that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. To give you a sense of what this might look like, check out the infrared image below, which was taken by COBE on Jan. 30th, 2000.
However, given that we still can’t seem them all, astronomers are forced to calculate the likely number of stars in the Milky Way based on a number of observable phenomena. They begin by observing the orbit of stars in the Milky Way’s disk to obtain the orbital velocity and rotational period of the Milky Way itself.
Estimates:
From what they have observed, astronomers have estimated that the galaxy’s rotational period (i.e. how long it takes to complete a single rotation) is apparently 225-250 million years at the position of the Sun. This means that the Milky Way as a whole is moving at a velocity of approximately 600 km per second, with respect to extragalactic frames of reference.
Infrared image of the Milky Way taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Then, after determining the mass (and subtracting out the halo of dark matter that makes up over 90% of the mass of the Milky Way), astronomers use surveys of the masses and types of stars in the galaxy to come up with an average mass. From all of this, they have obtained the estimate of 200-400 billion stars, though (as stated already) some believe there’s more.
Someday, our imaging techniques may become sophisticated enough that are able to spot every single star through the dust and particles that permeate our galaxy. Or perhaps will be able to send out space probes that will be able to take pictures of the Milky Way from Galactic north – i.e. the spot directly above the center of the Milky Way.
Until that time, estimates and a great deal of math are our only recourse for knowing exactly how crowded our local neighborhood is!
We have written many great articles on the Milky Way here at Universe Today. For example, here are 10 Facts About the Milky Way, as well as articles that answer other important questions.
Astronomy Cast did a podcast all about the Milky Way, and the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) have plenty of information about the Milky Way here.
And if you’re up for counting a few of the stars, check out this mosaic from NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day. For a more in-depth explanation on the subject, go to How the Milky Way Galaxy Works.
OK, I give up. I’ve sat here for about a half an hour trying to come up with a headline for this news piece. Actually, there are three different news items I’m combining into one article. One is fairly good news, the other two are very depressing.
First the good news: Today, the first major flight hardware of the Ares I-X rocket arrived in Florida to begin preparation for the inaugural test flight of NASA’s next-generation launch system. But amid this tangible event of moving toward the future comes bad financial news about the Constellation program. Congressional investigators have concluded that the Constellation program is likely to cost $7 billion more than budgeted if it is going to be ready to fly by its target date of March 2015. Without extra money, it could be delayed by 18 months or more.
At the same time another report concludes that NASA would need an extra $2 billion a year to keep its shuttle fleet flying beyond 2010, a measure which would shorten the gap where NASA wouldn’t have a human rated vehicle available for access to space. But doing so would hamper plans to convert a launch pad and other facilities for moon missions, likely delaying Constellation even more.
More money for either Constellation or the shuttle program is just not in NASA’s budget, and shifting money around from other programs “would be disastrous,” NASA shuttle program manager John Shannon said. “What we’re trying to do is find a path that continues to keep Americans flying on American vehicles, but does not mortgage the future of manned space flight,” he said. “We really have to step back and think very hard about what we want the future to look like, and make sure that we’re not going to make it something that is not achievable.”
I need ideas for a headline for this article. Readers — comments?
Both Republican presidential candidate John McCain and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama have said they would increase NASA’s budget by $2 billion to minimize the gap between shuttle retirement and the first piloted flights of Ares 1 rockets and Orion crew capsules. (This is being written before the election results are in.) But even that won’t be enough to solve all of the problems.
The Congressional Budget Office report listed several of problems facing the Ares I rocket and the Orion capsule, which NASA hopes will return astronauts to the moon by 2020. Among them are difficulties in developing an engine for Ares and a heat shield for Orion. “NASA has identified several problems associated with the Ares I that could delay successful development of the vehicle,” according to the 18-page report. Read the report here.
NASA officials said they were studying the report. But agency managers insist the program is on track.
At a news conference NASA held last week to counter reports of Constellation’s problems, Steve Cook, Ares project manager said, “The Ares I rocket is a sound design that not only meets the high safety standards required for a manned spacecraft, it is within budget, on schedule, and meets its performance requirements with margin.”
So what’s the real story? I’m not certain anymore. I desperately want to believe that the media (is that me, too?) overblowing the problems and NASA isn’t just looking through rose colored glasses. But the bad news keeps coming from all fronts.
NASA’s options other than the Ares appear limited.
One proposed option would extend the current space shuttle flight schedule through 2012, using the giant external fuel tanks and other hardware NASA has already planned to build. A second option calls for NASA to build more fuel tanks and hardware to keep flying three shuttle missions per year until 2015.
The CBO report also cautioned that the cost of more shuttle flights could only hurt Constellation under NASA’s limited budget.
Even by throwing more money at Constellation, the investigators also don’t think that NASA could speed up Constellation’s development, at least in the near term. They said NASA told them that “additional funding can no longer significantly change” the March 2015 target date of a first launch.
Even so, the Orlando Sentinel reports that NASA is looking at radical changes in the program to see if it can speed up development.
According to former astronaut Eileen Collins, currently a member of the NASA Advisory Council, one option under consideration would eliminate features needed to go to the moon and turn it a simple craft that could ferry crew and cargo to the space station. That would mean further delays for the real reason for Constellation: returning to the moon.
I thought we had some good news about Constellation last week. But this seems depressing. Too depressing for a headline.
