Blue Origin's New Shepard Flight Three: Pushing the Envelope

20 Years of Exoplanets

Saturn & Tiny Dione | NASA's Cassini Mission

As a convention for public release, Cassini images of Saturn are generally oriented so that Saturn appears north up, but the spacecraft views the planet and its expansive rings from all sorts of angles. Here, a half-lit Saturn sits askew as tiny moon Dione (698 miles or 1,123 kilometers across) looks on from lower left. And the terminator, which separates night from day on Saturn, is also askew, owing to the planet’s approach to northern summer solstice. As a result, the planet’s northern pole is in sunlight all throughout Saturn’s day, much as it would be on Earth during northern summer.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 7 degrees above the ring plane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Feb. 19, 2016 using a spectral filter that preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. North on Saturn is up and rotated 20 degrees to the right.

The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.2 million miles (1.9 million kilometers) from Saturn. Image scale is 68 miles (110 kilometers) per pixel.

The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

North America and Pelican Nebulae

The North America Nebula is an emission nebula in the constellation Cygnus, close to Deneb (the tail of the swan and its brightest star). The remarkable shape of the nebula resembles that of the continent of North America, complete with a prominent Gulf of Mexico.

The Pelican Nebula is an H II region associated with the North America Nebula in the constellation Cygnus. The gaseous contortions of this emission nebula bear a resemblance to a pelican, giving rise to its name. The Pelican Nebula is located nearby first magnitude star Deneb, and is divided from its more prominent neighbor, the North America Nebula, by a molecular cloud filled with dark dust.

Andromeda's spinning neutron star | European Space Agency

Decades of searching in the Milky Way’s nearby ‘twin’ galaxy
Andromeda have finally paid off, with the discovery of an elusive breed ofstellar corpse, a neutron star, by ESA’s XMM-Newton space telescope.


Andromeda, or M31, is a popular target among astronomers.
Under clear, dark skies it is even visible to the naked eye. Its proximity and
similarity in structure to our own spiral galaxy, the Milky Way, make it an
important natural laboratory for astronomers. It has been extensively studied
for decades by telescopes covering the whole electromagnetic spectrum.

Despite being extremely well studied, one particular class of
object had never been detected: spinning neutron stars.

Neutron stars are the small and extraordinarily dense remains
of a once-massive star that exploded as a powerful supernova at the end of its
natural life. They often spin very rapidly and can sweep regular pulses of
radiation towards Earth, like a lighthouse beacon appearing to flash on and off
as it rotates.

These ‘pulsars’ can be found in stellar couples, with the
neutron star cannibalizing its neighbor. This can lead to the neutron star
spinning faster, and to pulses of high-energy X-rays from hot gas being
funneled down magnetic fields on to the neutron star.

Binary systems hosting a neutron star like this are quite
common in our own Galaxy, but regular signals from such a pairing had never
before been seen in Andromeda.

Now, astronomers systematically searching through the
archives of data from XMM-Newton X-ray telescope have uncovered the signal of
an unusual source fitting the bill of a fast-spinning neutron star.

It spins every 1.2 seconds, and appears to be feeding on a
neighboring star that orbits it every 1.3 days.

“We were expecting to detect periodic signals among the
brightest X-ray objects in Andromeda, in line with what we already found during
the 1960s and 1970s in our own Galaxy,” says Gian Luca Israel, from
INAF-Osservatorio Astronomica di Roma, Italy, one of the authors of the paper
describing the results, “But persistent, bright X-ray pulsars like this are
still somewhat peculiar, so it was not completely a sure thing we would find
one in Andromeda.

“We looked through archival data of Andromeda spanning
2000–13, but it wasn’t until 2015 that we were finally able to identify this
object in the galaxy’s outer spiral in just two of the 35 measurements.

” While the precise nature of the system remains unclear, the
data imply that it is unusual and exotic.

“It could be what we call a ‘peculiar low-mass X-ray binary
pulsar’—in which the companion star is less massive than our Sun—or
alternatively an intermediate-mass binary system, with a companion of about two
solar masses,” says Paolo Esposito of INAF-Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e
Fisica Cosmica, Milan, Italy.

“We need to acquire more observations of the pulsar and its
companion to help determine which scenario is more likely.”

“The well-known Andromeda galaxy has long been a source of
exciting discoveries, and now an intriguing periodic signal has been detected
by our flagship X-ray mission,” adds Norbert Schartel, ESA’s XMM-Newton project
scientist.

“We’re in a better position now to uncover more objects like
this in Andromeda, both with XMM-Newton and with future missions such as ESA’s
next-generation high-energy observatory, Athena.”

Europa: Discover Life Under the Ice

"Looking for an interplanetary vacation destination? Consider a visit to Europa, one of the Solar System's most tantalizing moons. Ice-covered Europa follows an elliptical path in its 85 hour orbit around our ruling gas giant Jupiter. Heat generated from strong tidal flexing by Jupiter's gravity keeps Europa's salty subsurface ocean liquid all year round. That also means even in the absence of sunlight Europa has energy that could support simple life forms. Unfortunately, it is currently not possible to make reservations at restaurants on Europa, where you might enjoy a dish of the local extreme shrimp. But you can always choose another destination from Visions of the Future."

Visions of the Future: www.jpl.nasa.gov/visions-of-the-future/

Astonishing geology and the potential to host the conditions for simple life make Jupiter's moon Europa a fascinating destination for future exploration. Beneath its icy surface, Europa is believed to conceal a global ocean of salty liquid water twice the volume of Earth's oceans. Tugging and flexing from Jupiter's gravity generates enough heat to keep the ocean from freezing. On Earth, wherever we find water, we find life. What will NASA's Europa mission find when it heads for this intriguing moon in the 2020s?