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.
Category: space – Page 460
The Webb Telescope’s Latest Science Images Show The ‘Phantom Galaxy’ And More In Breathtaking Depth And Detail
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.
Metasurface Optics for Space Applications
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.
Astronomers find surprisingly complex magnetic fields in a galaxy’s halo
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.
But with the new data, they could see the directions these fields pointed across multiple dimensions. Their measurements revealed that the fields pointed alternately in and out of the galaxy’s disk along the flat view of the sky from Earth’s point of view. Another measurement showed that the fields also alternated in pointing toward and away from Earth along our line of sight to the galaxy.
Stunning JWST image turns dust in a distant galaxy into a purple swirl
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.
NASA’s $10 Billion Webb Space Telescope Has Been Permanently Damaged, Scientists Reveal
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.
China’s Tianwen-1 Mars probe just completed its number one goal
Tianwen-1 is a historic victory for both the CNSA and space exploration.
Upon successful orbital insertion and landing, Tianwen-1 became a historic victory for the CNSA and space exploration. Before Tianwen-1, the only two successful missions to send an orbiter and lander to Mars were NASA’s Viking 1 and 2 missions in 1975. Prior to that, the Soviet Union had attempted this feat with their Mars 2 and 3 missions in 1971 and Mars 6 in 1973.
Mars 2 was an outright failure, with the lander being destroyed and the orbiter sending back no data. On Mars 3, the orbiter obtained approximately eight months of data, and while the lander touched down safely, it only returned 20 seconds of data. On Mars 6, the orbiter produced data from an occultation experiment, but the lander failed on the descent.