The widely celebrated James Webb Space Telescope has received damage to one of its mirrors from a micrometeoroid, but NASA says not to worry. — Videos from The Weather Channel | weather.com
When asteroid 2019 OK suddenly appeared barreling toward Earth on July 25, 2019, Luisa Fernanda Zambrano-Marin and the team of astronomers at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico quickly sprang into action.
After receiving an alert, the radar scientists zoned in on the asteroid, which was approaching from Earth’s blind spot — solar opposition. Zambrano-Marin and the team had just 30 minutes to collect as many radar readings as they could. The asteroid was traveling so fast, that’s all the time she’d have it in Arecibo’s sights. University of Central Florida (UCF) manages the Arecibo Observatory for the U.S. National Science Foundation under a cooperative agreement.
Because the asteroid appeared to come out of nowhere and was traveling so fast, it made headline news.
Celebrate the end of summer with a lunar event like no other… maybe.
NASA has used the anniversary of the July 20, 1969 moonwalk to announce tentative launch dates for the first major stage of a mission designed to put human boots on the Moon again.
Just days after the first formal release of its first show-off images scientists using the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have posted some stunning new images of two spiral galaxies.
Posted on Flickr by Judy Schmidt working on the PHANGS Survey, the stunning image, above, shows the spectacular “Phantom Galaxy” (also called M74 and NGC 628), with others (scroll down) showing another spiral galaxy called NGC 7496.
The incredible new images are testament to Webb’s skill at seeing in infrared and thus seeing through the gas and dust that obscures a lot of what is going on in some of the most arresting objects in the night sky.
Metamaterial Space Applications:
In this presentation I will talk about nanophotonics, more specifically metasurfaces – subwavelength patterned surfaces – and explain how this can be used for space applications. As recently displayed by the stunning images from the James Webb space telescope, we often rely on recording the intensity of light (e.g. with a camera) to study the universe. However, light fundamentally has several additional degrees of freedom which can carry information, e.g. polarization, phase, and spectral content. While it is true that many conventional optical components can address these degrees of freedom individually (e.g., polarizers, phase retarders, and filters), metasurfaces enable general manipulations of phase, amplitude, and polarization on the nanoscale, thereby providing ample opportunity to create new versions of existing components and even enable functionality not possible using conventional technologies. In the presentation I will cover several examples of metasurfaces I have been working on and explain their relevance for space applications. I will attempt to explain the working principles, why metasurfaces can be useful, as well as how we fabricate metasurfaces in a cleanroom.
About the speaker: Dr. Tobias Wenger is a postdoc at JPL’s microdevices laboratory (MDL) where his main efforts relate to nanophotonics — light at the nanoscale – and how we can engineer structures and components in order to control light in new ways. Tobias received his PhD from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, where he worked on understanding the physical properties of plasmons in graphene.
At JPL, Tobias is applying his knowledge of subwavelength electromagnetics to design metasurface-based optical components, mainly for infrared wavelengths. Metasurfaces are a novel approach to optics which uses subwavelength elements for controlling the phase, amplitude and polarization of transmitted and/or reflected electromagnetic radiation. Tobias research interests intersect optics, computational electromagnetics, and microfabrication and he enjoys both the practical and theoretical aspects of this work. During his postdoc time at MDL, he has worked on metasurface-based optical concentrators, IR detectors, plasmonic filters, wavefront sensing, and grating replication.
Circa 2021
A new study says that we could terraform Mars by creating an artificial magnetic field around it to prevent harmful solar radiation.
Astronomers hope to explain how galaxies like this one can grow magnetic fields that stretch for thousands of light-years — and what affect they have on galactic evolution.
The finding came out of a project to study radio signals from spiral galaxies that are tilted so we see them edge-on from Earth’s point of view. For these galaxies, astronomers can more easily separate what’s happening outside of the galaxies’ disks, in the gas-filled “haloes” that surround them.
Using observations from a radio telescope in New Mexico called the Very Large Array, the astronomers measured properties of the radio emission coming from the halo of the galaxy NGC 4631. They’d known from past observations that there were large-scale magnetic fields that extended out of the disk into the halo of this galaxy.
Continue reading “Astronomers find surprisingly complex magnetic fields in a galaxy’s halo” »
An extraordinary image of the centre of the spiral galaxy NGC 628 taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has drawn comparisons to a Doctor Who vortex, but it could reveal important clues about how dust behaves in galaxies.
The image is a composite of three sets of data at different wavelengths taken by JWST’s mid-infrared instrument team. Gabriel Brammer at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, who isn’t affiliated with the team, downloaded the data and translated each of the infrared wavelengths to red, green and blue before combining them to produce one image.
NGC 628 has been imaged with visible light by other telescopes, including Hubble, and looks similar to our own Milky Way if viewed from above the galactic plane. But JWST’s ability to observe infrared light in high resolution reveals a hidden structure. “If our eyes could see in these mid-infrared wavelengths, the night sky would look a lot more like this picture, which I think would be spectacular, maybe a little terrifying,” says Brammer.
Scientists report that damage to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) caused by a micrometeoroid impact in late May 2022 may be more severe than previously believed.
A group of scientists evaluated the performance of the space telescope throughout its commissioning phase in a new report released last week following Webb’s amazing first photographs.
In this video, explore the various superdense remnants of massive stars, which hold between 1 and 3 times the Sun’s mass and are so dense that a teaspoon of their matter weighs about a billion tons.
