#NASA inspired

[aelfhild-astraedottir]

Cherry blossom of stardust

Breathtaking stellar bloom

Thy petals grace perfectly divided

By a blazing star’s diffraction spikes

As if photons made thy pollen

Whilst thy petals themselves

Are of cosmic dust

Illuminated by heat and artifact

Unto a billowing umber and scarlet

Gently folding into thy very flower

Fleeting beauty of our cosmos.

Poem © Ælfhild Astrædottir March 2023

Sakura to Supernova

This rare sight is a super-bright, massive Wolf-Rayet star. Calling forth the ephemeral nature of cherry blossoms, the Wolf-Rayet phase is a fleeting stage that only some stars go through soon before they explode.

The star, WR 124, is 15,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. It is 30 times the mass of the Sun and has shed 10 Suns worth of material – so far. As the ejected gas moves away from the star and cools, cosmic dust forms and glows in the infrared light detectable by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.

The origin of cosmic dust that can survive a supernova blast is of great interest to astronomers for multiple reasons. Dust shelters forming stars, gathers together to help form planets, and serves as a platform for molecules to form and clump together, including the building blocks of life on Earth.

Stars like WR 124 also help astronomers understand the early history of the universe. Similar dying stars first seeded the young universe with heavy elements forged in their cores – elements that are now common in the current era, including on Earth.

The James Webb Space Telescope opens up new possibilities for studying details in cosmic dust, which is best observed in infrared wavelengths of light. Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera balances the brightness of WR 124’s stellar core and the knotty details in the fainter surrounding gas. The telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument reveals the clumpy structure of the gas and dust nebula of the ejected material now surrounding the star.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[fairytaleprincessart]

happy full moon 🌕 ✨

make a wish and manifest.

[ashartstuff]

Just some girly pop Craig doodles I made a bit ago…. silly

[todayontumblr]

Wednesday, March 13.

They're gonna make you proud.

Because if space really is the place, consider them well on their way. En route, if you will. The following 12 mighty fine folk only went and graduated from NASA's astronaut school. They are now ready and set, suited and booted, to head up into that big old mysterious blanket above and see what's good. Perhaps they will bring y'all a souvenir. 

In the meantime, may we introduce you to the people who put the rad in graduation. Nay, who put the ace in space.

Do you want to be a NASA astronaut? Applications are now open. And be sure to check out The Universe is Calling: Apply to Be a NASA Astronaut (Official NASA Video feat. Morgan Freeman.)

Make sure to follow NASA on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!"

[danascullysjournal]

Below is the inspiration photo from NASA: M78 and some details of the painting.

The painting was also inspired by lyrics from Lazarus Drug by Meg Washington. At the end she details a rising and exploding into constellations, becoming all and nothing at once. This exploding and peeling off of deadened self to reveal starlight is what came to mind.

Birth of a Constellation

Digital Painting. Isa, 2024

Please click for better quality. :) Colours inspired by photograph of M78 from the Euclid Space Telescope. Thank you NASA for such amazing coloured images, detailing star formation and igniting imagination.

If you are interested in signed prints, they will be up on my Kofi soon. ✨

[poppy-does-science]

Eyes On the Solar System: the coolest website that nobody seems to know about?

If you're interested in what is going on in our solar system, you NEED to visit this NASA webpage.

It has the most beautiful graphics on what's going on in the solar system, with planets, moons, asteroids, spacecraft and satellites able to be viewed in their current, past, and projected future positions! Zooming in on the Earth really puts into perspective how much STUFF we have orbiting our planet! You can see the planets in the background in this screenshot, and the Hubble Space Telescope. The perspective it gives you is unrivalled!

You can also increase the speed of time and watch everything move at an accelerated pace! It is absolutely mesmerising. I love watching Voyager and Pioneer from the date of their launches making their way outside the soalr system, and James Webb being launched and then settling into its place at Lagrange point 2 (BTW, a really good visualisation of L2!).

So yeah, I highly recommend! Find it at this link:

[astrodances]

Very silly idea I had a couple months ago + good pose practice 😜🦆

[automatonknight]

id: a digital drawing of pioneer 9 and 10, as well as juice from 17776. they’re shown standing in line, holding hands and dancing. 9 is the most to the left and they’re leaning back and throwing their free hand up into the air. 10 is in the middle, lifting one of her legs up. juice is to the right, doing a sort of kneel while also pointing up with his free hand, on which he’s wearing one of those big hands made out of foam. both pioneer 9 and 10 are wearing jumpsuits, while juice is wearing a scraft, t-shirts and shorts. the background is black and the characters are only lined in their corresponding colors-9 using pink/red, 10 using green and juice using yellow. end id

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: The Moon (pt. 2)

Earth’s Moon is thought to have formed in a tremendous collision. A massive object ― named Theia after the mythological Greek Titan who was the mother of Selene, goddess of the Moon ― smashed into Earth, flinging material into space that became the Moon.

The brightest and largest object in our night sky, the Moon makes Earth a more livable planet by moderating our home planet's wobble on its axis, leading to a relatively stable climate. It also causes tides, creating a rhythm that has guided humans for thousands of years.

The Moon was likely formed after a Mars-sized body collided with Earth several billion years ago.

Earth's only natural satellite is simply called "the Moon" because people didn't know other moons existed until Galileo Galilei discovered four moons orbiting Jupiter in 1610. In Latin, the Moon was called Luna, which is the main adjective for all things Moon-related: lunar.

The many missions that have explored the Moon have found no evidence to suggest it has its own living things. However, the Moon could be the site of future colonization by humans. The discovery that the Moon harbors water ice, and that the highest concentrations occur within darkened craters at the poles, makes the Moon a little more hospitable for future human colonists.

With a radius of about 1,080 miles (1,740 kilometers), the Moon is less than a third of the width of Earth. If Earth were the size of a nickel, the Moon would be about as big as a coffee bean.

The Moon is an average of 238,855 miles (384,400 kilometers) away. That means 30 Earth-sized planets could fit in between Earth and the Moon.

The Moon is slowly moving away from Earth, getting about an inch farther away each year.

The Moon is rotating at the same rate that it revolves around Earth (called synchronous rotation), so the same hemisphere faces Earth all the time. Some people call the far side – the hemisphere we never see from Earth – the "dark side" but that's misleading. As the Moon orbits Earth, different parts are in sunlight or darkness at different times. The changing illumination is why, from our perspective, the Moon goes through phases. During a "full moon," the hemisphere of the Moon we can see from Earth is fully illuminated by the Sun. And a "new moon" occurs when the far side of the Moon has full sunlight, and the side facing us is having its night.

The moon's near and far side.

The Moon makes a complete orbit around Earth in 27 Earth days and rotates or spins at that same rate, or in that same amount of time. Because Earth is moving as well – rotating on its axis as it orbits the Sun – from our perspective, the Moon appears to orbit us every 29 days.

The leading theory of the Moon's origin is that a Mars-sized body collided with Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. The resulting debris from both Earth and the impactor accumulated to form our natural satellite 239,000 miles (384,000 kilometers) away. The newly formed Moon was in a molten state, but within about 100 million years, most of the global "magma ocean" had crystallized, with less-dense rocks floating upward and eventually forming the lunar crust.

Earth's Moon has a core, mantle, and crust:

The Moon’s core is proportionally smaller than other terrestrial bodies' cores. The solid, iron-rich inner core is 149 miles (240 kilometers) in radius. It is surrounded by a liquid iron shell 56 miles (90 kilometers) thick. A partially molten layer with a thickness of 93 miles (150 kilometers) surrounds the iron core.

The mantle extends from the top of the partially molten layer to the bottom of the Moon's crust. It is most likely made of minerals like olivine and pyroxene, which are made up of magnesium, iron, silicon, and oxygen atoms.

The crust has a thickness of about 43 miles (70 kilometers) on the Moon’s near-side hemisphere and 93 miles (150 kilometers) on the far-side. It is made of oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium, and aluminum, with small amounts of titanium, uranium, thorium, potassium, and hydrogen.

Long ago the Moon had active volcanoes, but today they are all dormant and have not erupted for millions of years.

With too sparse an atmosphere to impede impacts, a steady rain of asteroids, meteoroids, and comets strikes the surface of the Moon, leaving numerous craters behind. Tycho Crater is more than 52 miles (85 kilometers) wide.

Over billions of years, these impacts have ground up the surface of the Moon into fragments ranging from huge boulders to powder. Nearly the entire Moon is covered by a rubble pile of charcoal-gray, powdery dust, and rocky debris called the lunar regolith. Beneath is a region of fractured bedrock referred to as the megaregolith.

The light areas of the Moon are known as the highlands. The dark features, called maria (Latin for seas), are impact basins that were filled with lava between 4.2 and 1.2 billion years ago. These light and dark areas represent rocks of different compositions and ages, which provide evidence for how the early crust may have crystallized from a lunar magma ocean. The craters themselves, which have been preserved for billions of years, provide an impact history for the Moon and other bodies in the inner solar system.

If you looked in the right places on the Moon, you would find pieces of equipment, American flags, and even a camera left behind by astronauts. While you were there, you'd notice that the gravity on the surface of the Moon is one-sixth of Earth's, which is why in footage of moonwalks, astronauts appear to almost bounce across the surface.

The temperature on the Moon reaches about 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius) when in full Sun, but in darkness, the temperatures plummet to about -280 degrees Fahrenheit (-173 degrees Celsius).

During the initial exploration of the Moon, and the analysis of all the returned samples from the Apollo and the Luna missions, we thought that the surface of the Moon was dry.

The first definitive discovery of water was made in 2008 by the Indian mission Chandrayaan-1, which detected hydroxyl molecules spread across the lunar surface and concentrated at the poles. Missions such as Lunar Prospector, LCROSS, and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, have not only shown that the surface of the Moon has global hydration but there are actually high concentrations of ice water in the permanently shadowed regions of the lunar poles.

Scientists also found the lunar surface releases its water when the Moon is bombarded by micrometeoroids. The surface is protected by a layer, a few centimeters of dry soil that can only be breached by large micrometeoroids. When micrometeoroids impact the surface of the Moon, most of the material in the crater is vaporized. The shock wave carries enough energy to release the water that’s coating the grains of the soil. Most of that water is released into space.

In October 2020, NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) confirmed, for the first time, water on the sunlit surface of the Moon. This discovery indicates that water may be distributed across the lunar surface, and not limited to cold, shadowed places. SOFIA detected water molecules (H2O) in Clavius Crater, one of the largest craters visible from Earth, located in the Moon’s southern hemisphere.

The Moon has a very thin and weak atmosphere, called an exosphere. It does not provide any protection from the Sun's radiation or impacts from meteoroids.

The early Moon may have developed an internal dynamo, the mechanism for generating global magnetic fields for terrestrial planets, but today, the Moon has a very weak magnetic field. The magnetic field here on Earth is many thousands of times stronger than the Moon's magnetic field.

Earth’s Moon was born out of destruction.

Several theories about our Moon’s formation vie for dominance, but almost all share that point in common: near the time of the solar system’s formation, about 4.5 billion years ago, something ― perhaps a single object the size of Mars, perhaps a series of objects ― crashed into the young Earth and flung enough molten and vaporized debris into space to create the Moon.

Five Things We Learned from Apollo Moon Rocks

The chemical composition of Moon and Earth rocks are very similar.

The Moon was once covered in an ocean of magma.

Meteorites have shattered and melted rocks on the Moon’s surface through impacts.

Lava flowed up through cracks in the Moon’s crust and filled its impact basins.

Lunar “soil” is made of pulverized rock created by meteorite impacts.

If these writing notes helped with your poem/story, please tag me. Or leave a link in the replies. I'd love to read them!

Writing Notes: The Moon (pt. 1) ⚜ Writing Notes & References

[luc3ks]

bunch of misc stuff I've been doodlin and and chipping away at

[quirkquill]

"The journey of life is an intricate tapestry woven with the threads of joy and sorrow, resilience and vulnerability. In the depth of our experiences, we discover the profound truth that existence is not merely a sequence of moments, but a canvas where the strokes of hardship accentuate the beauty of triumph. Embrace the complexity, for within the intricate dance of shadows and light, we find the profound meaning that transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary."

[nasa]

Nora AlMatrooshi

Nora AlMatrooshi, the first Emirati woman astronaut, worked as a piping engineer before becoming an astronaut candidate for the United Arab Emirates. https://mbrsc.ae/team/nora/

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[celestialdaily]

The celestial object of the day is E0102!

a supernova remnant located in the Small Magellanic Cloud. This object helps scientists study the chemistry inside stars, and it contains thousands of times more oxygen than the entire solar system!

[fairytaleprincessart]

[plainblackcanvas56]

Hear me out. What if ... the Orion Pax => Optimus Prime Transformation was like a magical girl transformation sequence?

[poppy-does-science]

The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope is named after the Mother of Hubble

The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope (previously WFIRST) is a NASA mission set to launch in 2027. I think you guys need to know about more about it though, because although its technology is amazing, the most amazing thing about it is its name.

Dr Nancy Grace Roman was an executive at NASA, working as the Chief of Astronomy, Chief of Astronomy and Relativity, and Chief of Solar Physics (what cool job titles!!) from 1959 until her retirement in 1979. Among her many achievements (including being the first female NASA executive!), her most notable was Hubble.

Decades before people were ready to consider an investment such as Hubble, Dr Roman was pioneering for it, lobbying NASA officials to get it approved, putting together planning committees and fighting to secure funding.

Her dedication to Hubble earned her the nickname "Mother of Hubble". But I don't think this really emphasises her achievements enough. Hubble was the inspiration for so many space telescope missions, the mission that showed it was possible for the rest, the seed that sprouted so many more space telescopes, and so many more discoveries in our lifetimes.

By her own words “I think it would have existed sooner or later without me." But without her, how long would we have had to wait before this age of space telescopes? By being the Mother of Hubble, she has become the Mother of modern space-based astronomy.

The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope could not have a better name.

She often said, "for the price of one night at the movies each year, each American would receive 15 years of exciting discoveries." But she was wrong, because not just Americans, but people across the globe have now received over 30 years of discoveries!

Dr Nancy Grace Roman passed away on December 25th, 2018, three years to the date of the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. I think she would be thrilled to see how far space-based astronomy has come.

Read more about her: