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Tiny Grains of Dust from way-way-Outer Space

Alex H. Kasprak National Aeronautics and Space Administration Everything around us came from an ancient swirling disk of dust. Our sun, our planet and the planets of our solar system all formed from the remnants of this disk. Our mountains, our animals and even humans came from the sun that formed from this disk. Nobody on Earth has ever handled anything that came from anywhere else. Until recently, that is. Scientists think that a few microscopic grains caught by a NASA spacecraft might actually be from outside of our solar system. This interstellar dust — that’s the fancy name for it — was discovered thanks to both NASA and a group of citizen scientists who volunteered their time for the sake of science. In early 1999, NASA launched a mission called Stardust, whose job was to travel to a comet, collect its dust and return to Earth. Stardust used a trap with a special gel to collect tiny dust from the glowing area around the comet. On its way there, it also collected particles of dust floating around our solar system. After reaching the comet in 2006, it returned to Earth with its precious cargo. A great success! But analyzing all those dust grains is really hard. Some of the grains are a thousand times smaller than a grain of sand! Once the material was returned to Earth, scientists had to take millions of close-up pictures of the gel to help them locate the dust and analyze the dust. There were too many pictures for the Stardust team to analyze in their lifetime. So they uploaded these super-zoomed-in dust trap pictures to the Internet and let people — nicknamed “Dusters” — assist in the search. That really sped things along! Thanks to the volunteers’ work and the hard work of scientists involved with the project, NASA reported that they might have found seven (only seven!) grains of dust that came from outside our solar system. They think they came from somewhere else because their chemistry is very different than usual space dust. Where did they come from? They might have come from a huge supernova explosion millions of years in the past. Or they could have come from massive faraway stars. Either way, if the scientists are right, and it does turn out to be interstellar dust, it would be very exciting. These seven small grains could teach us about something that astronomers see all over space, but have never seen up close.

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Kids

The Sun’s Supersized Atmosphere

The Sun’s Supersized Atmosphere Alex H. Kasprak National Aeronautics and Space Administration Like Earth, the sun has an atmosphere with layers in it. The outermost layer is called the corona, and it’s a wild mess of activity. Scientists have long known about the corona. It is home to some spectacular shows — giant eruptions called Coronal Mass Ejections, loops, prominences and massive magnetic storms. Using NASA data, scientists recently made a shocking discovery about this solar region. It’s much bigger than they thought! While the sun is nearly 900,000 miles wide, the corona actually extends 5 million miles above the sun’s surface. In other words, the sun’s atmosphere is six times wider than the sun itself! Scientists made this discovery by looking at waves rippling through the area surrounding the sun. These waves are called magnetosonic waves. They can be seen passing through the corona as they move away from the sun. Once the corona becomes too thin, they can no longer be viewed. No more wave? No more corona! These magnetosonic waves are pretty wild, too. They are a bit like sound waves and a bit like a weird kind of magnetic wave. Sound waves cannot be heard in space, since there is nothing for them to pass through to get to Earth. And sound waves are too small to be viewed from afar. Magnetosonic waves, though, are about 10 times the length of Earth. With some clever work, scientists figured out a way to see them with a pair of NASA satellites in orbit around the sun. The discovery that the corona is so large is an important one. Before this discovery, scientists thought they had a pretty good idea where the sun’s atmosphere ended and where the rest of space began. They couldn’t be happier that they were wrong. That’s because NASA is working on a new spacecraft that will travel to the sun. It will go closer to the sun than any previous mission. When NASA started working on it, they weren’t sure if it would actually travel through the corona itself. With this new discovery, they now know for sure that it will! Images from NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory that show waves traveling through the corona. The sun itself is blocked out to make the corona easier to view. Credit: NASA/STEREO.

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Kids

A Mega-Mysterious Mega-Earth

Alex H. Kasprak National Aeronautics and Space Administration Three years ago, scientists announced the discovery of a planet orbiting around a Sun-like star 550 light-years away. They were able to calculate how big the planet was by looking at how much dimmer the star became when the planet passed in front of it. This planet is 2.5 times the size of Earth (but way too close to its star to be habitable). No real surprise there. Most of the planets we find outside our solar system are much bigger than Earth. The larger ones are easier to spot! The big surprise came later, after scientists used another method to figure out the planet’s mass. It turns out that this planet, named Kepler-10c, has a mass 17 times greater than Earth. That’s just about the mass of the icy giant Neptune! Until now, scientists assumed that any planet with a mass that large must be made up of mostly gas. But a gas planet 2.5 times the size of Earth would have much less mass than this one. The large mass of this planet confused scientists because it went against how they thought planets form. Typically planets form when a disk of gas and dust surrounds a new star. Bits of dust clump together to form larger and larger objects. Smaller objects became rocky planets. Bigger objects attract even bigger clouds of gas. These clouds eventually form gas giants. At least that’s what scientists thought. So here’s the million-dollar question: how could this rocky object get so big without attracting a huge ball of gas around it? Scientists don’t have a clear answer to this question yet. But that’s what makes science so great! Even when you think you have figured it all out, there are new and exciting mysteries to explore. After all, science would be pretty boring if we already knew the answer to everything, wouldn’t it? Artist’s conception of Kepler-10c (in front) close to its star and another smaller planet. Credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics/David Aguilar.

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A Glimpse Into the Past

Alex H. Kasprak National Aeronautics and Space Administration Science would be a lot easier with a time machine, wouldn’t it? Scientists are always asking questions about how things in the past led to the universe we know today. Take the formation of our solar system 4.6 billion years ago. We’ve got a pretty good idea of how it happened, but wouldn’t it be great if we could see actual snapshots of the entire process? We can actually get pretty close to doing that, it turns out. A group of astronomers recently went back and looked at some old photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. They wanted to see if a new way of looking at the photos would allow them to observe other stars in the early stages of forming a solar system. What these astronomers were looking for were hazy, dusty disks of debris surrounding young stars. That’s because we are pretty sure that our solar system formed from a dusty cloud that turned into a star. The material left over would have collected into a massive disk with gas, dust and larger bits of space junk colliding and growing in size as they orbited around the star. Eventually, we think, these clumps would have formed into the planets, moons, asteroids and comets we know today. It’s pretty hard to see dust or even a planet elsewhere in the galaxy. We’ve seen them before, but it would be great to be able to go back and use old data to try and find more of them. These scientists decided to take a look at how light scattered around some stars already imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. They looked for evidence of material blocking the path of the stars’ light. Their efforts paid off. Using the new technique, they found five new disks around stars that showed no signs of having a disk the first time scientists looked at them. One of the stars, HD 141943, appears to be exactly like our own sun when it was first forming planets. It’s practically a snapshot of the birth of our own solar system! With any luck, scientists will be able to locate more and more planet-forming disks by applying this method to other old (and new) images. If we find more systems similar to our own at different stages in their evolution, we might be able to see the whole process of solar system formation from start to finish. That would be as close to using a time machine as we are ever going to get! Watch this cool video about how our solar system formed at NASA’s Space Place and then download the accompanying poster: http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/solar-system-formation.

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Kids

A Humanoid in Space Gets Its Legs

The latest shipment to the International Space Station blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, late last month. On it was the usual cargo: repair parts, basic supplies and a bunch of cool new experiments. But it also included something a little bit out of the ordinary — a pair of legs. Don’t worry. They aren’t human legs. But they are humanoid legs. They are for a human-like robot named Robonaut 2, or R2. Since 2011, R2 has been busy in the International Space Station learning how to operate in space. Because there is so much to learn, both for the human astronauts and for R2 itself, it began this process with only a torso. But R2 has made great progress since it arrived at the space station. The time has come for it to try out some legs! With only a torso and some arms, R2 has already made quite an impression on the human astronauts in the space station. The idea with R2 was to create a robot that is so human-like that it can use any human tool and react to its environment and the people around it. To be a worthy companion up in space, it has to be strong, but it also has to be able to perform very delicate tasks. R2 has to be aware of its own strength, and it has to know when to be careful not to use too much of that strength. The ultimate goal is to have humans and robots working side by side. NASA would like robots to perform some of the more mundane repetitive jobs in the space station, to free up astronauts for other scientific tasks. In the three years R2 has spent in space, it has proven to be an able helper, taking care of boring jobs like measuring airflow around the station and learning how to vacuum. But with a brand-new pair of legs, tested on other R2s down here on Earth, NASA hopes that it could one day perform complex and dangerous repairs outside the space station. NASA even envisions a future for humanoid robots further away in the Solar System. These robots wouldn’t replace humans, but they could be used to help astronauts set up and prepare for missions on other places like Mars or the Moon. But before any of that happens, of course, this Robonaut is going to have to learn how to walk. Learn about other space robot projects while putting together a fun puzzle at the Space Place: http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/space-robots. Robonaut 2 at work on the International Space Station. Photo Credit: NASA.

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Kids

Earth Shaking GPS News

Alex H. Kasprak National Aeronautics and Space Administration Early Saint Patrick’s Day morning, residents of Los Angeles woke up to a jolt. The ground was rumbling. Then, suddenly, it seemed as if the whole world was kicked out of place. It was an earthquake. Within seconds, computers at the United States Geological Survey pinpointed the quake’s center and calculated how strong it was. They figure that out with a network of seismometers — tools that measure how much the ground shakes. But some scientists think that GPS (Global Positioning System) devices can help provide the same information even faster and with greater accuracy. Getting this information right as soon as possible is important. That’s because the big waves traveling through the ground from an earthquake are slow enough that you can actually warn other areas to prepare for some shaking before the waves get there. But right now it can be hard to get an accurate estimate right away. Sometimes the strength of a quake or the location of its center is miscalculated at first. The St Patrick’s Day quake, for example, was originally reported as being stronger than it actually was. And this is where GPS comes into play. That’s right, the very same system that tells you where you are on the Earth and helps you navigate to the nearest pizzeria, may also monitor ground motion caused by earthquakes. Scientists are currently testing such a system. They are taking existing GPS base stations — with extremely accurate GPS receivers — and adding new tools to them so they can sense subtle movements in the ground as they occur. The GPS base station provides the location down to a few centimeters. The new tools monitor and detect slight movements of the Earth’s crust at the station’s location. With a network of these stations, you may have enough information to estimate the earthquake’s center and its magnitude and then issue a warning automatically and within seconds. This would not help people right near the center of the earthquake. Yet even a few seconds of warning could be the difference between life and death for people further away. They could prepare by taking cover, shutting down dangerous things like natural gas lines, stop elevators at the nearest floor and slow down moving trains. Earthquake monitoring is not easy. Predicting earthquakes remains pretty much impossible. But an early warning issued by a network of extremely accurate GPS stations could be just the tool to help reduce some of the risks of these Earth-shaking natural disasters in the future. Learn about how GPS works at NASA’s Space Place: http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/gps and be sure to check out a fun animation and poster about how it can be used to hunt down a tasty pizza: http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/gps-pizza.

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Space Place

Bright Flash on the Moon Leads to a New Crater

On March 17, 2013, a meteor the size of a small boulder traveling more than 70 times the speed of a bullet crashed into the surface of the Moon. It created an explosion so bright that it could be seen from Earth — without a telescope! Scientists think that the force of the explosion was the same as about 5 tons of dynamite going off all at once. The whole thing was captured on video, too! NASA uses telescopes here on Earth to watch the Moon for impacts. NASA has been doing this since 2005. The March 17 impact was the largest they have ever seen. Scientists wanted to see what kind of damage this speeding rock caused. A couple of months later, NASA was able to use a spacecraft orbiting the Moon to zoom in on the area from the flash. They found a bright, white crater. It had to be the crater caused by the meteor. A picture from 2012 of the same place had no crater there! The Moon has a rich history of getting hit by meteors. Its surface is covered in all kinds of craters from impacts both big and small. Early on in its history, billions of years ago, the solar system was full of objects crashing into each other. Without weather or many of the geologic processes on Earth to remove them, lots of the craters on the Moon’s surface are from this ancient time. But that doesn’t mean that the Moon’s surface stopped changing after its hectic early years. Thanks to space rocks still zipping around our solar system today, the Moon’s surface is not frozen in time. Instead, its ancient features are dotted with the scars of impacts that have occurred to this day. As you look at the Moon in the night sky, let its cratered surface be a reminder of the power and wonder of our busy stellar neighborhood. To check out a video of the meteor hitting the moon and to learn more about this exciting event, check out: www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYloGuUZCFM.

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