Posted in space
#MayTheFourthBeWithYou from the real-world Space Warfighters at Air Force Space Command! You will now watch this video we made—unless Jedi mind tricks don’t work on you. Either way, please share! #StarWarsDay
#StarWarsDay #StarWars #StarWarsCelebration #NASA #MayThe4thBeWithYou
Space Screening, ‘TIE’-ins, Tatooine and The Droids You’re Looking For
NASA astronauts “use the force” every time they launch … from a certain point of view. We have real-world droids and ion engines. We’ve seen dual-sun planets like Tatooine and a moon that eerily resembles the Death Star. And with all the excitement around the premiere of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the Force will soon be felt 250 miles above Earth on the International Space Station. Disney is sending up the new film so the astronauts can watch in orbit, and the station’s commander, Scott Kelly, can hardly wait:
If you’re looking to be a “sky walker” yourself someday, NASA is now taking astronaut applications and we’re offering a list of Star Wars-related reasons you should apply. Recently returned station astronaut Kjell Lindgren is such a fan that he posed with his station crewmates in a Jedi-themed mission poster and talked to StarWars.com about it. Shortly before leaving the station, Lindgren tweeted about the uncanny resemblance of the station’s cupola to the cockpit of an Imperial TIE Fighter:
Posted in space
How far is far? And, how do you know when you get there? In 1995, astronomers decided to use Hubble to conduct a bold and daring experiment to address this puzzle. For 10 consecutive days, Hubble stared at one tiny, seemingly empty patch of sky for 1 million seconds.
The gamble of precious telescope time paid off. Hubble captured the feeble glow of myriad never-before-seen galaxies. Many of the galaxies are so far away it has taken billions of years for their light to reach us. Therefore, the view is like looking down a “time corridor,” where galaxies can be seen as they looked billions of years ago. Hubble became astronomy’s ultimate time machine.
The resulting landmark image is called the Hubble Deep Field. At the time, the image won the gold medal for being the farthest peek into the universe ever made. Its stunning success encouraged astronomers to pursue a series of Hubble deep-field surveys. The succeeding surveys uncovered more galaxies at greater distance from Earth, thanks to new cameras installed on Hubble during astronaut servicing missions. The cameras increased the telescope’s power to look even deeper into the universe.
Astrophysicists Szabolcs Marka at Columbia University and Imre Bartos at the University of Florida, have identified a violent collision of two neutron stars 4.6 billion years ago as the likely source of some of the most coveted matter on Earth.
This single cosmic event, close to our solar system, gave birth to 0.3 percent of the Earth’s heaviest elements, including gold, platinum and uranium, according to a new paper appearing in the May 2 issue of Nature.
“This means that in each of us we would find an eyelash worth of these elements, mostly in the form of iodine, which is essential to life,” Bartos said. “A wedding ring, which expresses a deep human connection, is also a connection to our cosmic past predating humanity and the formation of Earth itself, with about 10 milligrams of it likely having formed 4.6 billion years ago.”
Now you can discover Daymet Daily Surface Weather Data, which includes precipitation, temperature, and other weather variables from 1980–2018 through the NASA Application for Extracting and Exploring Analysis Ready Samples (AρρEEARS) application!
About AppEEARS: AρρEEARS offers users a simple and efficient way to perform data access and transformation processes. By enabling users to subset data spatially, temporally, and by layer, the volume of data downloaded for analysis is greatly reduced. Sample requests submitted to AρρEEARS provide users with data values and associated quality data for a variety of remote sensing data products. Two types of sample requests are available: point samples of geographic coordinates or area samples of vector polygons. Interactive visualizations with summary statistics of the sample results are provided within the application to allow the user to preview and interact with their sample before downloading the data.
Explore NASA’s AppEEARS: https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/tools/appeears/
