New Telescope Set for Launch May 11 from New Mexico05.10.13

NASA will launch a new telescope designed to observe distant galaxies on a suborbital sounding rocket at 1 a.m. EDT, May 11, from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

The observations will be conducted using the FORTIS (Far-ultraviolet Off Rowland-circle Telescope for Imaging and Spectroscopy) spectro/telescope developed at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Stephan McCandliss, principal investigator for the mission, said, “The goal of FORTIS is to explore the mysteries of escaping of ultraviolet radiation from the dusty confines of galaxies, using a new type of spectro/telescope with more than six times the sensitivity of our previous experiments. FORTIS can acquire spectra from forty-three individual targets simultaneously, and autonomously, within an angular region as large as the diameter of the moon (1/2 degree).”

FORTIS is to fly on a Black Brant IX suborbital sounding rocket to an altitude of about 173 miles, providing approximately 360 seconds of exo-atmospheric observation time for FORTIS. The experiment will land via parachute approximately 50 miles from the launch site where it will be recovered. The total mission time is approximately 900 seconds from launch to landing.

Milky Way Black Hole Snacks on Hot Gas

The Herschel space observatory has made detailed observations of surprisingly hot gas that may be orbiting or falling towards the supermassive black hole lurking at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Herschel is a European Space Agency mission with important NASA participation.

"The black hole appears to be devouring the gas," said Paul Goldsmith, the U.S. project scientist for Herschel at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "This will teach us about how supermassive black holes grow."

Our galaxy's black hole is located in a region known as Sagittarius A* -- or Sgr A* for short -- which is a nearby source of radio waves. The black hole has a mass about four million times that of our sun and lies roughly 26,000 light-years away from our solar system.

Even at that distance, it is a few hundred times closer to us than any other galaxy with an active black hole at its center, making it the ideal natural laboratory to study the environment around these enigmatic objects. At Herschel's far-infrared wavelengths, scientists can peer through the dust in our galaxy and study the turbulent innermost region of the galaxy in great detail.

The biggest surprise was the hot gas in the innermost central region of the galaxy. At least some of it is 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit (around 1,000 degrees Celsius), much hotter than typical interstellar clouds, which are usually only a few tens of degrees above absolute zero, or minus 460 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 273 degrees Celsius).

The team hypothesizes that emissions from strong shocks in highly magnetized gas in the region may be a significant contributor to the high temperatures. Such shocks can be generated in collisions between gas clouds, or in material flowing at high speeds.

Using near-infrared observations, other astronomers have spotted a separate, compact cloud of gas amounting to just a few Earth masses spiralling toward the black hole. Located much closer to the black hole than the reservoir of material studied by Herschel in this work, it may finally be gobbled up later this year.
Spacecraft, including NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, will be waiting to spot any X-ray burps as the black hole enjoys its feast.

Hubble Sees the Remains of a Star Gone Supernova

These delicate wisps of gas make up an object known as SNR B0519-69.0, or SNR 0519 for short. The thin, blood-red shells are actually the remnants from when an unstable progenitor star exploded violently as a supernova around 600 years ago. There are several types of supernovae, but for SNR 0519 the star that exploded is known to have been a white dwarf star — a Sun-like star in the final stages of its life.

SNR 0519 is located over 150 000 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Dorado (The Dolphinfish), a constellation that also contains most of our neighboring galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Because of this, this region of the sky is full of intriguing and beautiful deep sky objects.

The LMC orbits the Milky Way galaxy as a satellite and is the fourth largest in our group of galaxies, the Local Group. SNR 0519 is not alone in the LMC; the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope also came across a similar bauble a few years ago in SNR B0509-67.5, a supernova of the same type as SNR 0519 with a strikingly similar appearance.

Tis the Season -- for Plasma Changes at Saturn

Researchers working with data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft have discovered one way the bubble of charged particles around Saturn -- known as the magnetosphere -- changes with the planet's seasons. The finding provides an important clue for solving a riddle about the planet's naturally occurring radio signal. The results might also help scientists better understand variations in Earth's magnetosphere and Van Allen radiation belts, which affect a variety of activities at Earth, ranging from space flight safety to satellite and cell phone communications.

The paper, just published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, is led by Tim Kennelly, an undergraduate physics and astronomy major at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, who is working with Cassini's radio and plasma wave science team.

In data collected by Cassini from July 2004 to December 2011, Kennelly and his colleagues examined "flux tubes," structures composed of hot, electrically charged gas called plasma, which funnel charged particles in towards Saturn. Focusing on the tubes when they initially formed and before they had a chance to dissipate under the influence of the magnetosphere, the scientists found that the occurrence of the tubes correlates with radio wave patterns in the northern and southern hemisphere depending upon the season. This seasonal effect is roughly similar to the way Earth's northern lights appear more frequently in the spring and autumn months.

Radio emissions have been used to measure Jupiter's rotation period reliably, and scientists thought it would also help them determine Saturn's rotation period. To their chagrin, however, the pattern has varied over the visits by different spacecraft and even in radio emissions originating in the northern and southern hemispheres. The new results could help scientists hone in on why these signals vary the way they do.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., manages the mission for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The radio and plasma wave science team is based at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, where the instrument was built. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.

Herschel Links Water Around Jupiter to Comet Impact

Astronomers have finally found direct proof that almost all water present in Jupiter's stratosphere, an intermediate atmospheric layer, was delivered by comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which famously struck the planet in 1994.

The findings, based on new data from the Herschel space observatory, reveal more water in Jupiter's southern hemisphere, where the impacts occurred, than in the north. Herschel is a European Space Agency mission with important NASA participation.

The origin of water in the upper atmospheres of the solar system's giant planets has been debated for almost two decades. Astronomers were quite surprised at the discovery of water in the stratospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, which dates to observations performed with ESA's Infrared Space Observatory in 1997.

While the source of water in the lower layers of their atmospheres can be explained as internal, the presence of this molecule in their upper atmospheric layers is puzzling due to the scarcity of oxygen there. Its supply must have an external origin. Since then, astronomers have investigated several possible candidates that may have delivered water to these planets, from icy rings and satellites to interplanetary dust particles and cometary impacts.

Data from Herschel's Photodetecting Array Camera and Spectrometer (PACS), with the help of NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility, helped solve the mystery at Jupiter by showing an asymmetry in the distribution of water in its stratosphere, caused by the comet impact. Additional proof for a cometary source for the water came from Hershel's heterodyne instrument for the far infrared (HIFI), which probed the vertical profile of water in the stratosphere. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., helped build the HIFI instrument.

"The asymmetry between the two hemispheres suggests that water was delivered during a single event and rules out icy rings or moons as candidate sources," says Thibault Cavalié from the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux, France, who led the study. "Local sources would provide a steady supply of water, which over time would lead to a hemispherically symmetric distribution in the stratosphere. Depending on whether the chemical species are transported in neutral or ionized form, local sources of water would result in higher concentrations either at the poles or along the equator, but not in a north-south asymmetry."

Hubble Sees a Unique Cluster: One of the Hidden 15

Palomar 2 is part of a set of 15 globulars known as the Palomar clusters. These clusters, as the name suggests, were discovered in survey plates from the first Palomar Observatory Sky Survey in the 1950s, a project that involved some of the most well-known astronomers of the day, including Edwin Hubble. They were discovered quite late because they are so faint -- each is either extremely remote, very heavily hidden behind blankets of dust, or has a very small number of remaining stars.

This particular cluster is unique in more than one way. For one, it is the only globular cluster that we see in this part of the sky, the northern constellation of Auriga (The Charioteer). Globular clusters orbit the center of a galaxy like the Milky Way in the same way that satellites circle around the Earth. This means that they normally lie closer in to the galactic center than we do, and so we almost always see them in the same region of the sky. Palomar 2 is an exception to this, as it is around five times further away from the center of the Milky Way than other clusters. It also lies in the opposite direction -- further out than Earth -- and so it is classed as an "outer halo" globular.

It is also unusual due to its apparent dimness. The cluster is veiled by a mask of dust, dampening the apparent brightness of the stars within it and making it appear as a very faint burst of stars. The stunning NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows Palomar 2 in a way that could not be captured from smaller or ground-based telescopes -- some amateur astronomers with large telescopes attempt to observe all of the obscure and well-hidden Palomar 15 as a challenge, to see how many they can pick out from the starry sky.

NASA's Hubble Sees a Horsehead of a Different Color

Astronomers have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to photograph the iconic Horsehead Nebula in a new, infrared light to mark the 23rd anniversary of the famous observatory's launch aboard the space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990.

Looking like an apparition rising from whitecaps of interstellar foam, the iconic Horsehead Nebula has graced astronomy books ever since its discovery more than a century ago. The nebula is a favorite target for amateur and professional astronomers. It is shadowy in optical light. It appears transparent and ethereal when seen at infrared wavelengths. The rich tapestry of the Horsehead Nebula pops out against the backdrop of Milky Way stars and distant galaxies that easily are visible in infrared light.

Hubble has been producing ground-breaking science for two decades. During that time, it has benefited from a slew of upgrades from space shuttle missions, including the 2009 addition of a new imaging workhorse, the high-resolution Wide Field Camera 3 that took the new portrait of the Horsehead.

The nebula is part of the Orion Molecular Cloud, located about 1,500 light-years away in the constellation Orion. The cloud also contains other well-known objects such as the Great Orion Nebula (M42), the Flame Nebula, and Barnard's Loop. It is one of the nearest and most easily photographed regions in which massive stars are being formed.

In the Hubble image, the backlit wisps along the Horsehead's upper ridge are being illuminated by Sigma Orionis, a young five-star system just out of view. Along the nebula's top ridge, two fledgling stars peek out from their now-exposed nurseries.

Scientists know a harsh ultraviolet glare from one of these bright stars is slowly evaporating the nebula. Gas clouds surrounding the Horsehead already have dissipated, but the tip of the jutting pillar contains a slightly higher density of hydrogen and helium, laced with dust. This casts a shadow that protects material behind it from being stripped away by intense stellar radiation evaporating the hydrogen cloud, and a pillar structure forms.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md., conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy Inc., in Washington.