NASA

[1979Shocker]

Zoomed in on ISS over full moon

[Kung Wu]

ISIS is on the moon!?! Those pesky terrorists are EVERYWHERE!

[Shocker-maniac]

AI used NASA data to find a solar system with eight planets. That's the same number of planets as in our solar system, and until now another one had not been found with that many. Kepler-90 is a sun-like star 2,545 light years from earth. The solar system is like ours with smaller planets closer to the star, and larger ones farther out. However, these planets are much closer together. The neural network used Kepler space telescope data, and identified the eighth planet that was previously missed.

Read more here: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/a...g-distant-star

[SubGod22]

Found this kind of interesting.

NASA Turns Light into Sound Frequency Creating a Milky Way Symphony (LISTEN)

A collaboration between NASA and musicians has seen a photograph of the Milky Way from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory turned into a musical piece after they matched the wavelengths of light to wavelengths of sound in order to show our home galaxy in a whole different light—namely a musical one.

While astronomers working with Chandra weren’t chilling out to the lo-fi beats of the Milky Way (feat. Supermassive Black Hole) when they took the photograph of the galactic center, it did dawn on them that they were producing a pretty false image, since they were imaging X-rays that can’t be seen by the human eye.

It’s been standard practice to color code various wavelengths of light, even if those don’t correspond to light our eyes would actually perceive, in order to disseminate X-ray space photographs to the public.

This time, Kimberly Arcand, an expert in astronomy visualization at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, collaborated with several musicians to create a musical guide to interpreting the contents of the photograph.

The galactic center is just the most recent and expressive musical track, but many other features and regions of space have been “sonified” with the help of astrophysicist and musician Matt Russo, and sound engineer Andrew Santaguida who together run a project called System-Sounds that sonifies astronomical data.

Video/audio in the link.

[SubGod22]

'Hello, Voyager!' Celebrated Spacecraft Is Once Again Transmitting After NASA Repair from 15 Billion Miles Away

Last November, one of NASA’s most famous craft, Voyager 1, stopped transmitting messages to the great anxiety of those responsible for receiving them.

It wasn’t all stress though, because mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally.

Now however, the most distant object from the Earth made by humans is again sending data on the health and status of its onboard engineering systems as it drifts through interstellar space.

It’s been 46 years and 7 months since Voyager 1 left Earth, and 11 years and 8 months since it bade Pluto farewell and left our solar system.

In March 2024, mission control for Voyager 1 at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at California Technical Institute, managed to hone in on the issue that was preventing two-way communication with the probe.

The team at JPL discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the flight data subsystem (FDS) memory—including some of the FDS computer’s software code—wasn’t, and still isn’t, working anymore.

The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.

So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.

[SubGod22]

Voyager is back in the news.

Voyager 1 is alive: NASA spacecraft reawakens 15 billion miles away from Earth

Voyager 1 has been venturing deep into the interstellar space. But recently, this aging spacecraft encountered a silent challenge.

After a brief silence, the distant spacecraft reached out to Earth again on October 24.

On October 16th, Voyager 1’s fault protection system kicked in, a safety measure designed to preserve the spacecraft’s limited power. This unexpected action caused a disruption in communication, leaving the mission team uncertain about its status.

As per NASA, one of the spacecraft’s radio transmitters has malfunctioned, and engineers are investigating the cause. The transmitter was automatically disabled by the spacecraft’s fault protection system.

The spacecraft’s automated system protects itself by shutting down unnecessary systems.

Pretty interesting that it takes nearly 24 hours for a message to be received by Voyager and then another 24 to get back to NASA. That's a lot of space to cover.

[ShockBand]

Voyager is back in the news.

Voyager 1 is alive: NASA spacecraft reawakens 15 billion miles away from Earth



Pretty interesting that it takes nearly 24 hours for a message to be received by Voyager and then another 24 to get back to NASA. That's a lot of space to cover.

It's one light-DAY from Earth. Now to think that the closest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light-YEARS away from us. Scales of distance that are nearly impossible to fathom.