Known as International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 and International Cometary Explorer, this spacecraft scored a number of firsts - including the first comet flyby. *Image Credit*: NASA
Amazing Andromeda Galaxy
Title
Amazing Andromeda Galaxy
Description
The many "personalities" of our great galactic neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, are exposed in this new composite image from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer and the Spitzer Space Telescope. The wide, ultraviolet eyes of Galaxy Evolution Explorer reveal Andromeda's "fiery" nature -- hotter regions brimming with young and old stars. In contrast, Spitzer's super-sensitive infrared eyes show Andromeda's relatively "cool" side, which includes embryonic stars hidden in their dusty cocoons. Galaxy Evolution Explorer detected young, hot, high-mass stars, which are represented in blue, while populations of relatively older stars are shown as green dots. The bright yellow spot at the galaxy's center depicts a particularly dense population of old stars. Swaths of red in the galaxy's disk indicate areas where Spitzer found cool, dusty regions where stars are forming. These stars are still shrouded by the cosmic clouds of dust and gas that collapsed to form them. Together, Galaxy Evolution Explorer and Spitzer complete the picture of Andromeda's swirling spiral arms. Hints of pinkish purple depict regions where the galaxy's populations of hot, high-mass stars and cooler, dust-enshrouded stars co-exist. Located 2.5 million light-years away, the Andromeda is our largest nearby galactic neighbor. The galaxy's entire disk spans about 260,000 light-years, which means that a light beam would take 260,000 years to travel from one end of the galaxy to the other. By comparison, our Milky Way galaxy's disk is about 100,000 light-years across. This image is a false color composite comprised of data from Galaxy Evolution Explorer's far-ultraviolet detector (blue), near-ultraviolet detector (green), and Spitzer's multiband imaging photometer at 24 microns (red).
Explorer XVII Satellite
Title
Explorer XVII Satellite
Full Description
Weighing 405 lbs. (184 kg), this 35-inch (89-cm) pressurized stainless steel sphere measured the density, composition, pressure and temperature of Earth's atmosphere after its launch from Cape Canaveral on April 3, 1963. The mission was one of three that Goddard Space Flight Center specifically conducted to learn more about the atmosphere's physical properties?knowledge that they ultimately used for scientific and meteorological purposes. Explorer XVII carried two spectrometers, four vacuum pressure gauges and two electrostatic probes. Before it reached its intended orbit that ranged from 158 to 570 miles (254-917 km) above Earth, the satellite was spun up to about 90 rpm.
Date
01/01/1963
NASA Center
Goddard Space Flight Center
Cartwheel Galaxy Makes Waves
Title
Cartwheel Galaxy Makes Waves
Description
This false-color composite image shows the Cartwheel galaxy as seen by the Galaxy Evolution Explorer's Far Ultraviolet detector (blue), the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera-2 in B-band visible light (green), the Spitzer Space Telescope's Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) at 8 microns (red), and the Chandra X-ray Observatory's Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer-S array instrument (purple). Approximately 100 million years ago, a smaller galaxy plunged through the heart of Cartwheel galaxy, creating ripples of brief star formation. In this image, the first ripple appears as an ultraviolet-bright blue outer ring. The blue outer ring is so powerful in the GALEX observations that it indicates the Cartwheel is one of the most powerful UV-emitting galaxies in the nearby universe. The blue color reveals to astronomers that associations of stars 5 to 20 times as massive as our sun are forming in this region. The clumps of pink along the outer blue ring are regions where both X-rays and UV radiation are superimposed in the image. These X-ray point sources are very likely collections of binary star systems containing a blackhole (called Massive X-ray Binary Systems). The X-ray sources seem to cluster around optical/UV bright supermassive star clusters. The yellow-orange inner ring and nucleus at the center of the galaxy result from the combination of visible and infrared light, which is stronger towards the center. This region of the galaxy represents the second ripple, or ring wave, created in the collision, but has much less star for mation activity than the first (outer) ring wave. The wisps of red spread throughout the interior of the galaxy are organic molecules that have been illuminated by nearby low-level star formation. Meanwhile, the tints of green are less massive, older visible light stars. Although astronomers have not identified exactly which galaxy collided with the Cartwheel, two of three candidate galaxies can be seen in this image to the bottom left of the ring, one as a neon blob and the other as a green spiral. Previously, scientists believed the ring marked the outermost edge of the galaxy, but the latest GALEX observations detect a faint disk, not visible in this image, that extends to twice the diameter of the ring.
Brief History of the Univers
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Title
Brief History of the Universe
Description
This artist's timeline chronicles the history of the universe, from its explosive beginning to its mature, present-day state. Our universe began in a tremendous explosion known as the Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago (left side of strip). Observations by NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer and Wilkinson Anisotropy Microwave Probe revealed microwave light from this very early epoch, about 400,000 years after the Big Bang, providing strong evidence that our universe did blast into existence. Results from the Cosmic Background Explorer were honored with the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics. A period of darkness ensued, until about a few hundred million years later, when the first objects flooded the universe with light. This first light is believed to have been captured in data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The light detected by Spitzer would have originated as visible and ultraviolet light, then stretched, or redshifted, to lower-energy infrared wavelengths during its long voyage to reach us across expanding space. The light detected by the Cosmic Background Explorer and the Wilkinson Anisotropy Microwave Probe from our very young universe traveled farther to reach us, and stretched to even lower-energy microwave wavelengths. Astronomers do not know if the very first objects were either stars or quasars. The first stars, called Population III stars (our star is a Population I star), were much bigger and brighter than any in our nearby universe, with masses about 1,000 times that of our sun. These stars first grouped together into mini-galaxies. By about a few billion years after the Big Bang, the mini-galaxies had merged to form mature galaxies, including spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way. The first quasars ultimately became the centers of powerful galaxies that are more common in the distant universe. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured stunning pictures of earlier galaxies, as far back as ten billion light-years away.
Older Galaxy Pair Has Surpri
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Title
Older Galaxy Pair Has Surprisingly Youthful Glow
Description
A pair of interacting galaxies might be experiencing the galactic equivalent of a mid-life crisis. For some reason, the pair, called Arp 82, didn't make their stars early on as is typical of most galaxies. Instead, they got a second wind later in life -- about 2 billion years ago -- and started pumping out waves of new stars as if they were young again. Arp 82 is an interacting pair of galaxies with a strong bridge and a long tail. NGC 2535 is the big galaxy and NGC 2536 is its smaller companion. The disk of the main galaxy looks like an eye, with a bright "pupil" in the center and oval-shaped "eyelids." Dramatic "beads on a string" features are visible as chains of evenly spaced star-formation complexes along the eyelids. These are presumably the result of large-scale gaseous shocks from a grazing encounter. The colors of this galaxy indicate that the observed stars are young to intermediate in age, around 2 million to 2 billion years old, much less than the age of the universe (13.7 billion years). The puzzle is: why didn't Arp 82 form many stars earlier, like most galaxies of that mass range? Scientifically, it is an oddball and provides a relatively nearby lab for studying the age of intermediate-mass galaxies. This picture is a composite captured by Spitzer's infrared array camera with light at wavelength 8 microns shown in red, NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer combined 1530 and 2310 Angstroms shown in blue, and the Southeastern Association for Research in Astronomy Observatory light at 6940 Angstroms shown in green.
5-Panel version of Chandra,
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Name
5-Panel version of Chandra, GALEX, Spitzer & Hubble Images
Ellen Weaver, Biologist
Title
Ellen Weaver, Biologist
Full Description
Ellen Weaver, an associate professor of biology from California State University is shown developing instrumentation to be used in satellites for ocean monitoring. In the early 1970s, NASA researchers and ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau formed a team to study productivity of the sea. The team devised a sensor system to monitor ocean temperatures and chlorophyll levels by aircraft. This sensor was used in the satellite communication and weather equipment provided by NASA to assist in the accuracy of satellite observation.
Date
2/8/1973
NASA Center
Headquarters
NASA's Hubble Space Telescop
…
Title
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope Establishes Accurate New Distance Measurement To Neighboring Galaxy
General Information
What is an American Astronomical Society Meeting release? A major news announcement issued at an American Astronomical Society meeting, the premier astronomy conference. Recent observations of the remnants of Supernova 1987A, conducted with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have provided an unexpected bonus - an accurate determination of the absolute distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, located in the southern hemisphere. Read more: * Release Text [ http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1991/03/text/ ]
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