SpaceX Falcon 9 Launch and Landing

One of the unintended consequence of blazing new trails is, often, capturing incredible photographs. That’s how we ended up with this gorgeous shot that shows SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket both taking off and landing… in a single long exposure.

This particular image was captured on July 18th, the night the Falcon 9 delivered the Dragon cargo spacecraft into orbit.

Once the payload was securely on its way to the International Space Station, the rocket’s first stage descended back to Earth where it made a successful landing that, no matter how many times you see it, should still inspire awe.

In total, about 9 minutes elapsed between takeoff and landing.

Relativistic jets and the Collapsar model

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) were first detected by American nuclear detection surveillance satellites in the late 1960s. The Vela spacecraft series were designed to monitor world-wide compliance with the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The satellites detected no clandestine nuclear explosions, but they discovered something far more interesting: powerful bursts of gamma rays emanating from random directions in space. By analyzing the different arrival times of the bursts as detected by different satellites, scientists concluded that the sources of the bursts were cosmic and not terrestrial or solar. The discovery was declassified and published in 1973 as an Astrophysical Journal article entitled “Observations of Gamma-Ray Bursts of Cosmic Origin”. This alerted the astronomical community to the existence of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), now recognized as the most violent events in the universe.

To this day GRBs remain one of the greatest mysteries of modern astronomy. We know that GRBs lasting less than 2 seconds (short GRBs) may originate from a variety of processes. There are several theories that explain how the energy from a gamma-ray burst progenitor is turned into radiation. One hypothesis describing how long gamma-ray bursts originate is called the “collapsar” model: gamma-rays are generated when massive, spinning stars collapse to form black holes and spew out powerful jets of plasma at nearly the speed of light.These stellar collapses (collapsars) are thought to be similar to supernovae, except that a jet is produced by the accretion of stellar material onto a compact object formed at the center of the collapsing star.


These jets are called ’relativistic jets’ and they can transport the energy from the collapsed core to large distances. Inside the jet, the uneven distribution of temperature, density and pressure create internal shock waves that move inward and outward as faster regions within the jet collide with slower ones. The collisions between the fast-moving gas and its surroundings, as well as within the jet itself, create gamma rays. When the jet hits the surrounding interstellar medium it produces another shock wave. This causes particles to rapidly lose energy (fast cooling), due to the strong magnetic field in the GRB emission region, through a process known as synchrotron radiation. This phenomenon is observed as long gamma-ray bursts and it’s followed by a so-called “afterglow”, a slowly fading emission that can be seen at all wavelengths; starting with X-rays, followed by ultraviolet, visible and infrared light, and eventually radio waves.The afterglow can last for days or even weeks.

Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

New Dwarf Planet in our Solar System

Our map of the solar system still has huge unexplored chunks, which astronomers just proved with the discovery of a dwarf planet hanging out around Neptune and Pluto.

The tiny, 700-kilometer object is called RR245, and astronomers estimate it's about twice the distance that Neptune is from the sun; it takes the dwarf planet about 700 years to revolve all the way around the sun.

"The icy worlds beyond Neptune trace how the giant planets formed and then moved out from the sun," Michele Bannister, a postdoctoral researcher who worked on the project, said in a statement. "They let us piece together the history of our solar system. But almost all of these icy worlds are painfully small and faint: It's really exciting to find one that's large and bright enough that we can study it in detail."

Future research could help us determine the role that dwarf planets played in the formation of the early universe.

It's clear we have a lot more exploring to do.

Solar System: Things to Know This Week

Our solar system is huge, let us break it down for you. Here are a few things to know this week:

1. Up at Jupiter, It’s Down to Business

Ever since our Juno mission entered Jupiter’s orbit on July 4, engineers and scientists have been busy getting their newly arrived spacecraft ready for operations. Juno’s science instruments had been turned off in the days leading up to Jupiter orbit insertion. As planned, the spacecraftpowered up five instruments on July 6, and the remaining instruments should follow before the end of the month. The Juno team has also scheduled a short trajectory correction maneuver on July 13 to refine the orbit.

2. The Shadows Know

Scientists with our Dawn mission have identified permanently shadowed regions on the dwarf planet Ceres. Most of these areas likely have been cold enough to trap water ice for a billion years, suggesting that ice deposits could exist there now (as they do on the planet Mercury). Dawn is looking into it.

3. Frosts of Summer

Some dusty parts of Mars get as cold at night year-round as the planet’s poles do in winter, even in regions near the equator in summer, according to new findings based on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter observations. The culprit may be Mars’ ever-present dust.

4. Can You Hear Me Now?

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is designed to sample an asteroid and return that sample to Earth. After launch in Sept., the mission’s success will depend greatly on its communications systems with Earth to relay everything from its health and status to scientific findings from the asteroid Bennu. That’s why engineers from our Deep Space Network recently spent a couple of weeks performing detailed tests of the various communications systems aboard OSIRIS-REx.

5. Cometary Close-ups

The Rosetta spacecraft has taken thousands of photographs of Comet 67/P. The European Space Agency (ESA) is now regularly releasing the highest-resolution images. The word “stunning” is used a lot when referring to pictures from space—and these ones truly are

Shadow of Surveyor 1

Shadow of Surveyor 1

Image of Surveyor 1’s shadow against the lunar surface in the late lunar afternoon, with the horizon at the upper right. The Surveyor program was a NASA program that, from June 1966 through January 1968, sent seven robotic spacecraft to the surface of the Moon. Its primary goal was to demonstrate the feasibility of soft landings on the Moon. Surveyor 1, the first of the five Surveyor missions to make a successful soft landing, proved the spacecraft design and landing technique. In addition to transmitting over 11,000 pictures, it sent information on the bearing strength of the lunar soil, the radar reflectivity, and temperature.

Credit: NASA/JPL