National Aeronautics and Space Administration

On January 10, the Solar Dynamics Observatory snapped this image of the sun in extreme ultraviolet light, capturing a dark coronal hole.


MONDAY January 10: Observations of distant galaxies help solve a centuries-old molecular mystery.

Gateway to space: Goddard scientist Harley Thronson, University of Texas partner Dan Lester, and aerospace industry colleague Ted Talay explain today in the Space Review how the United States can maintain a presence in space after the Shuttle and the ISS programs conclude.

Hanny’s what? You probably can’t pronounce it correctly, but the Hubble Space Telescope has snapped a picture of Hanny’s Voorwerp.

Hubble says: Tiny red dwarf stars, smaller than our sun, can unleash powerful eruptions that may release the energy of more than 100 million atomic bombs.

Fermi surprise: Thunderstorms spew antimatter into space!


TUESDAY January 11: The latest Earth-observing satellite developed by NASA, Glory, arrived Tuesday at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., in preparation for a Feb. 23 launch.

Tropical storm warning: NASA’s Aqua satellite flew over the low pressure area known as System 93P in the Southern Pacific Ocean early today and saw rainfall already occurring over Vanuatu.


WEDNESDAY January 12: Global surface temperatures in 2010 tied 2005 as the warmest on record. And also get the science behind the news: Do annual temperature rankings matter?

Inconstant Crab: X-ray emission from the Crab Nebula is weakening.

Magnificent magnification: As many as 20 percent of the most distant galaxies currently detected appear brighter than they actually are because of the magnifying effect of gravity from other galaxies.

Comet rendezvous: On this day in 2005, NASA launched Deep Impact, the first space mission to probe beneath the surface of a comet. Six months later, on July 3, the spacecraft jettisoned an impactor that crashed into comet Tempel 1. The crash provided the most up-close data and images of a comet in the history of space exploration.

The white stuff: Goddard gets a light dusting of the white stuff. It was no Snowpocalypse, but it was pretty.


THURSDAY January 13: On this day in 1997, NASA scientists announced the discovery of three black holes in three normal galaxies, suggesting that nearly all galaxies may harbor supermassive black holes.

La Nina: A new Ocean Surface Topography Mission (OSTM)/Jason-2 satellite image of the Pacific Ocean captures stronger La Nina cooling in the Pacific.

Two-faced: Hubble Space Telescope captures two radically different views of the Whirlpool Galaxy.

Not-so-heavy metal video: Learn about beryllium, the wonder metal at the heart of the Webb Telescope.

ICESat away: On this day in 2003, NASA launched the ICESat mission. It was the first mission specifically designed to study Earth’s polar regions with a space-based laser altimeter. The mission led to advances in measuring changes in the mass of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, polar sea ice thickness, vegetation-canopy heights, and the heights of clouds and aerosol particles. The ICESat mission ended in February 2010 with the failure of the last of its three lasers. After a controlled maneuver to bring the craft out of orbit, ICESat entered Earth’s atmosphere over the Barents Sea on August 30, 2010. A follow-on mission, ICESat-2, is slated for launch in 2015.

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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

My colleague Frank Reddy at Goddard Space Flight Center has kindly cooked up some quick illustrations to drive home the massive scale of that giant looping filament on the sun that everybody was oooing and ahhhing about in the blogpodcastotwittersphere yesterday, including the ever-blogolicious Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait. There’s a video of the beast out now, too.

To make these images, Frank laid Earth and Jupiter along the filament. In the full-disk illustration, Earth is a mere 15 pixels in diameter! By the way, the Earth image is the famous Apollo 17 photo, much shrunken, and the Jupiter snapshot is from Cassini.








_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.



This just in from our “Solar Dynamics Observatory is blowing my mind” department — and SpaceWeather.com:  a plasma mega-snake on the sun.

A magnetic filament snaking around the sun’s southeast limb just keeps getting longer. The portion visible today stretches more than 700,000 km–a full solar radius. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory took this picture during the early hours of Dec. 6th. The STEREO-B spacecraft, stationed over the sun’s eastern horizon, saw this filament coming last week. So far the massive structure has hovered quietly above the stellar surface, but now it is showing signs of instability. Long filaments like this one have been known to collapse with explosive results when they hit the stellar surface below. Stay tuned for action.




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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.



On October 7, 2010, the moon passed between NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and its target. And SDO saw the equivalent of a partial solar eclipse — from space.  The SDO “Pick of the Week” write-up below provides additional details. Watch the incredible video to see the dark shadow of the moon chug across the surface of our sun.

This was a first for SDO and it was visually engaging too. On October 7, 2010, SDO observed its first lunar transit when the new Moon passed directly between the spacecraft (in its geosynchronous orbit) and the Sun. With SDO watching the Sun in a wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light, the dark Moon created a partial eclipse of the Sun.

These images, while unusual and cool to see, have practical value to the SDO science team. Karel Schrijver of Lockheed-Martin’s Solar and Astrophysics Lab explains: “The very sharp edge of the lunar limb allows us to measure the in-orbit characteristics of the telescope e.g., light diffraction on optics and filter support grids. Once these are characterized, we can use that information to correct our data for instrumental effects and sharpen up the images to even more detail.”

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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

Steele Hill, Goddard’s salesman of all things solar, just posted the latest weekly release of Sun imagery, courtesy of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Steele dubs it “The South Rises Again”

SDO watched as an active region in the Sun’s southern hemisphere produced a whole series of looping arcs of plasma in profile (Sept. 11-13, 2010).  The arcs are actually charged particles spiraling along magnetic field lines.  The images were taken in extreme ultraviolet light and reveal the dynamic activity visible above active regions.  The material seen here is ionized iron heated to about one million degrees.  We have seen very little activity in this hemisphere as opposed to the northern one, hence the tongue in cheek title.

This image is a feast, but it’s true beauty shines through when you play the video. It’s a whopper of a file, so make sure you’ve got a fast Internet connection and give it a few seconds to download.

click to zoom in on the action

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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

majestic spiral

MONDAY AUGUST 9: NASA Earth Observatory has a new blog: Elegant Figures. . . EO’s lead data visualizer, Robert Simmon, will write about how he makes data and information clear and beautiful.

frozen fall: The Aqua satellite watches as nearly 97 square miles of ice breaks off Greenland’s Petermann Glacier.

blueshift’s gotchu: NASA Blueshift’s Weekly Awesomeness Round Up spotlights the Hubble Gotchu Guy media frenzy, the wild week of storm sun headlines, and the cover story in the September 2010 Astronomy magazine about the James Webb Space Telescope by Goddard science writer Frank Reddy.



TUESDAY AUGUST 10: NASA image release highlights a majestic spiral galaxy captured gloriously by the Hubble Space Telescope.

solar turmoil: The Solar Dynamics Observatory YouTube page spotlights a video of turmoil on the sun’s surface in extreme ultraviolet wavelengths.

stormy sun

apollo’s scout: On this day in 1966, NASA launched Lunar Orbiter 1 to scout the moon’s surface for Surveyor and Apollo landing sites.



WEDNESDAY AUGUST 11: On the NASA Blueshift blog, Goddard intern Faith Tucker writes about the dinosaur-astronomy connection.

the roaming stones: Goddard science writer Liz Zubritsky profiles the daring NASA interns who stalked mysterious wandering stones in Death Valley this summer.

water bear cowboy: Geeked On Goddard profiles one of the Death Valley interns, Kris Schwebler, and his research on tiny “water bears” and how they survive drying, hard vacuum, and radiation.



THURSDAY AUGUST 12: In a new video profile, meet astrobiologist Joe Nuth who says scientists are just like everyone else, but a little nerdier.



roaming stones

shocking! The Fermi Telescope discovers that a supernova’s little cousin can emit gamma rays. The press release includes a slick video visualizing a white dwarf star sucking gas off its neighbor and flaring into a nova.

nova hunters: Meanwhile, Geeked On Goddard profiles the duo of dedicated amateur astronomers in Japan who first alerted the world to the gamma ray nova.

night time at goddard: In the latest issue of Goddard View, read about Milky J’s appearance, the recent Space Shuttle crew visit, and Goddard’s Edward Cheung, the newly dubbed Knight of the Royal Order of the Netherlands Lion.

yes, there IS an echo in here: 50 years ago today, NASA launched Echo 1, the first passive communications satellite.

total recon: Also on this day, five years ago, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter launched.

contrails away! In the What On Earth blog, NASA Langley Research Center’s Lin Chambers writes about contrails formed by rocket exhaust plumes.

sunset sequence

FRIDAY AUGUST 13: The Earth Science Picture of the Day features a spectacular sunset sequence by Oregon photographer Randall Scholten.

russian fires: NASA’s Terra Satellite Sees Intense Fires and Smoke Over Western Russia.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

Have you seen Little SDO? It’s a digital character conceived and created by Goddard animator and video producer Chris Smith. Watch the video(s) below and come back if you’re curious…

Ok, here’s the deal. Smith started working for Goddard about 3 years ago. And he started playing around with some open-source animation software called Blender. Not surprising: Smith basically taught himself animation and video editing in high school.

But what to animate? A satellite seemed like a good idea. Goddard has lots of those. We’re virtually a satellite garage of earth-observing, astrophysical, and planet-probing spacecraft. Smith chose the Solar Dynamics Observatory — “SDO” to us satellite geeks.

“When I first started, I was messing around with this 3-D animation program, and I was thinking what would be an interesting satellite to model. I saw that SDO was just coming out. It kind of occurred to me that if you looked at it in a certain way, it looked like it had four little eyes and two wings and the satellite that could be a tail. So I figured if I was going to make this thing, it should be a character rather than just a satellite.”

In short, SDO was anthropomorphable.  Simply meaning it could be made to resemble something human, or at least something birdlike. Something biological and breathing. Something people could connect with on an emotional level.

So Smith made a demo video of him interacting with the character. This was the sort of hey-kids-let’s-put-on-a-show noodling around that often leads to the most innovative media NASA cranks out.

Little SDO scored. “Educators love it,” Smith says. “Kids love it.”

Smith made three “Little SDO” shorts (see below) and an even shorter “Introducing Little SDO” promo (the one at the top of the blog). The first one came out about a year ago, after the launch date for SDO became pretty firm and NASA wanted to create a buzz about the mission.

In case it’s not obvious, that’s Chris Smith in all four videos, playing the hapless human straight man Abbot to Little SDO’s mischievous Lou Costello. (Please tell me there are a few people out there who remember Abbot and Costello!)

People looking for in-depth science might leave the Little SDO experience unsatisfied. But the films serve a different but equally important purpose.

“One of the best ways to hook younger people, especially kids, is through more entertaining things that still get the idea across of what we’re doing,” Smith says.

***READ Discover Magazine blogger Ian O’Neill’s savvy take on Li’l SDO on the Astroengine blog.









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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

gamma blitz

MONDAY JULY 19: A year ago, something hit Jupiter, the Hubble Space Telescope saw it, and Goddard scientists were part of the response.

SPRECHEN SIE GAMMA BLITZ? The website for the German magazine Der Spiegel has produced a cool video — it’s (duh) in German, by the way — about last week’s breaking news about a gamma-ray burst (GRB) that temporarily “blinded” the Swift observatory. In German, a GRB is called a “gamma blitz.” (Yup, they make you first watch a commercial, in German, before the gamma-ray blitz starts.)

AWESOME STATISTIC: The NASA Blueshift Weekly Awesomeness Round-up takes the prize this week for most blogolicious science statistic. NASA scientists helped discovered a black hole with massive jets blasting from its poles. “If the black hole were shrunk to the size of a soccer ball,” scientist Robert Scoria explained, “each jet would extend from the Earth to beyond the orbit of Pluto.”


TUESDAY JULY 20: Today in 1976, NASA’s Viking 1 Lander touched down safely on the surface of Mars. Also, a NASA mission called “Apollo 11″ landed two guys on the moons, whereupon one of them, named Neil Armstrong, went outside to take a giant leap for mankind. . . . The National Aeronautics and Space Administration Facebook page did a lusciously detailed and dramatic series of posts reenacting the mission.

UP FROM THE DEPTHS: The central peak of Aristarchus Crater on the moon has deep origins. Read about it on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LROC) Featured Image website.

SLICK OPERATIONS: See the NASA satellite time-lapse video of the Gulf oil spill through July 14, 2010.


HOW HIGH THE FOREST? The NASA Earth Science News Team’s Adam Voiland features a first-of-its kind map of the height of the world’s forests — based on data collected by NASA’s ICESat, Terra, and Aqua satellites.

star power

WEDNESDAY JULY 21: NASA-funded researcher Bo-wen Shen re-runs the formation of the Tropical Cyclone Nargis in a supercomputer. COOL SHIPS: On the What On Earth blog, NASA Earth Science News Team reporter Gretchen Cook-Anderson profiles NASA/Goddard scientist Charles Kironji, who discovered that the wakes of ocean-going ships have a local chilling effect on climate. ATTRACTIVE: Sparkley loopy new shot of our supermagnetic home star from the Solar Dynamics Observatory uploads to the Goddard Flickr site.

booted out

THURSDAY JULY 22: Today in 1962, NASA launched the ill-fated Mariner 1 spacecraft bound for Venus. The vehicle was destroyed by the Range Safety Officer 293 seconds after launch when it veered off course.

GIRLS IN SPACE: Ten Girl Scout teams nationwide, including two girls from Kansas, spent the week at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland as part of a NASA’s “Girls in Space” program. . . . This evening, members of the Goddard Astronomy Club held a special star party for the Scouts at the Visitor Center, featuring the moon, Venus, Saturn, and summer constellations.

COSMIC COOKERY: A new video explains how a powerful instrument called a mass spectrometer figures out the recipe of the universe.

FROZEN FLOW: NASA Earth Science News Team writer Kathryn Hansen reports on the Antarctic Surface Accumulation and Ice Discharge (ASAID) project. The project is making a new map of the “grounding line” where ice breaks off into the ocean.

AND STAY OUT! NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has detected two stars being tossed out of the Milky Way Galaxy.

FRIDAY JULY 23: The historic Landsat 1 satellite launched this day in 1972. Images from Landsat 1 demonstrated the usefulness of remote sensing data for land surveys, land management, water resource planning, agricultural forecasting, forest management, sea ice movement, and cartography.

HOT LINKS: The University of Virginia Engineering Department’s E-News Online for July profiles Alexandra Hoeft (Engr Sci, Math’11), a spring 2010 intern with NASA Undergraduate Student Research Program (USRP). Hoeft worked for 15 weeks at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with NASA mentor Stephen Waterbury. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

click to make me big!

Like most earthlings, you probably didn’t make it to Easter Island to see the solar eclipse on Sunday July 11. But here’s something you would not have been able to see even from Easter Island: a combined space-and-surface view of the eclipse.

This is another in the series of fantastic solar images that Goddard’s Steele Hill releases to science museums and other public places every week from the Solar Dyanamics Observatory (SDO), SOHO, and STEREO spacecraft. Hill is one of our media people for those three missions.

Steele created this image by combining an image taken by the Williams College Expedition to Easter Island (the black-and-white portion) with snapshots from space courtesy of SDO and SOHO.

SOHO’s contribution, in red, shows the sun’s outer atmosphere (corona). To make the corona more visible,  SOHO uses a device called a “coronograph” to cover the glaring central disk. It’s sort of what you do when you hold your palm out to mask the blinding glare of a bright light shining in your eyes.

The Williams College image (again, the black-and-white portion) shows the sun’s inner corona.

Finally, SDO donated the image of the sun’s central disk to cover the silhouette of the moon, which blocked the sun’s glare during the eclipse.

Steele Hill

Voila! A truly blogolicious composite of gogblog’s favorite star ever!

In Steele’s own words:

I’ve done this several times before.  The challenge is correctly rotating the image to align the structures in the eclipse image with the structures the coronagraph sees.  Since the eclipse image was taken in the South Pacific, the image has a different perspective versus our spacecraft.  But that did not take too long.  I like the way that we can combine ground-based and space-borne images and bring the three perspectives together.

For additional details about this image, read the NASA image release from this morning. And let’s not forget to thank Jay M. Pasachoff, Muzhou Lu, and Craig Malamut from the Williams College Eclipse Expedition for allowing this use of their image.

An earlier gogblog post explores one of Steele Hill’s previous solar images from SDO.

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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center.

SUNDAY JULY 4: On this day in 1997, the inexpensive Mars Pathfinder (costing only $267 million) bounced on its air bags to the surface of the Red Planet.


MONDAY JULY 5: While the rest of us were on a federal holiday, seeking shelter from the brain-melting heat wave, the NASA Blueshift team posts their Weekly Awesomeness Roundup, with blogolicious multimedia tidbits from NASA, astronomy, and science at large. . . . GOGBLOG’S FAVE: How do 7th graders sketch/describe scientists before and after a visit to Fermilab? Is it: “Mommy, I’m afraid, can we go home now?” Find out the surprising answer for yourself!



TUESDAY JULY 6: NASA fires off a special Hubble Space Telescope image of star cluster NGC 3603 reminiscent of a July 4 fireworks air burst. Thanks, Wide Field Camera 3 — an instrument developed jointly by the Hubble program at Goddard Space Flight Center, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation

KEEPIN’ IT GREEN: At an event hosted by the Green Building Council, the Maryland Department of Environment presents Goddard Space Flight Center with a Maryland Green Registry Leadership Award for continuing efforts to reduce GSFC’s environmental footprint — including reducing the amount of waste it produces by 25 percent.

GOOD DAY SUNSHINE: The SDOMission2009 YouTube channel posts a new video, Seeing A Star In A New Light, highlighting the head-explodingly cool images of the sun captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory.

WEDNESDAY JULY 7: A web feature by NASA Earth Science News Team reporter Patrick Lynch details the upcoming field campaign by NASA aircraft and satellites to study hurricanes: the Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes (GRIP) mission. Goddard researchers Scott Braun and Gerry Heymsfield and other members of the GRiP science team will use the new data to figure out what spins up killer storms.

THURSDAY JULY 8: What on Earth spotlights other NASA bloggers who cover earth science, including {ahem} gogblog . . . . READY FOR TAKE-OFF: Today’s featured post: Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Tony Freeman writes on the Big Fat Planet blog about NASA’s aerial armada of research aircraft. . . . NASA: spaceships, airships, and more.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera team posts its featured image — a snapshot of the Apollo 16 landing site lit by a high-noon sun. . . . TAKE THAT, FAKE MOON LANDING CONSPIRACISTS: Shining brightly are the package of scientific instruments that astronauts left at the site as well as the radioisotope-powered electric generator that powered them for years after we left the moon.

TEMPLE VIEW: NASA Blueshift blogger Maggie Masetti recalls her trip to ancient ruins at Mexico’s Chichen Itza and the lunar eclipse she witnessed there.


FRIDAY JULY 9: Bright-eyed and bushy tailed Goddard sun scientists Alex Young and Holly Gilbert give press interviews starting at {{shudder}} 6:00 a.m. to preview the July 11 total solar eclipse. Here is Holly being interviewed on a Tampa TV show. . . . and this clip of Alex talking about the eclipse. (Sorry, in both cases, you will have to watch a short commercial message first.)

HOW’S THE VIEW? The June 2010 Goddard View is available, with the NASA Center for Climate Simulation Discover supercomputer gracing the cover.

ITS A BIRD, IT’S A PLANE? What On Earth blogger Adam Voiland posts the first-ever What On Earth Is THAT? guess-what-this-image-is recurring contest blog feature thingie. Guess correctly and win a free suborbital Virgin Galactic flight with Paris Hilton. Guess correctly and win the undying admiration of a NASA science blogger.

THE GOLDEN ARCHES: New Solar Dynamics Observatory video shows glowing star stuff arcing along loops in the sun’s magnetic field.

SATURDAY JULY 10: On this day in 1962, Telstar 1 — the first privately funded satellite — was launched. AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories paid the bill.
HOT LINKS-O-THE WEEK: In Outside Goddard, Elizabeth M. Jarrell offers short profiles of current and former Goddard people and the interesting lives they lead outside the gates. When Bob Met Alice profiles “newlyweds Bob Wigand, 85, and Mary Alice, 86, thank Goddard for giving them a common background.

I CAN SEE YOUR BIG FAT PLANET FROM HERE: Don’t miss Goddard’s Flickr album of Earth. Pretty pix and animations of the home planet.

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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center.