NASA

NASA

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Pushing the boundaries of what’s possible⁣ ⁣ Our X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft has just a bit more to go before its first flight. First, it’ll go through medium- and high-speed taxi tests, which focus on how the aircraft handles at higher ground speeds, including braking, steering, stability, and sensor performance. The X-59 team will also assess how well the visibility systems work since the cockpit has no forward-facing window (see the second photo for a close-up).⁣ ⁣ Then, it’s time to take to the skies! This first flight won’t be quiet, but it will let the team check critical systems like engine performance and autopilot and will ensure the aircraft is ready for future flight tests.⁣ ⁣ The X-59 is the centerpiece of NASA’s Quesst mission, which aims to demonstrate quiet supersonic flight by reducing the loud sonic boom to a quieter “thump.”⁣ ⁣ Image descriptions: 1 – The X-59 aircraft sits on the ramp at sunrise. The Sun turns the whole sky a rich, golden color. The X-59 faces to the right; it has a distinctive long and pointy nose. There are a few people working in front of the plane. 2 – A close-up view of a test pilot inside the X-59. He is lowering the canopy, which is cylinder-shaped and has a clear part that you can see through.⁣ ⁣ Credit: Lockheed Martin Corporation⁣ ⁣ #NASA #X59 #Quiet #Flight #Aeronautics #Aircraft

08.26 00:12

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🖤 Dark energy—it’s not just a phase, Mom. This image from @NASAHubble shows off Abell 209, a massive galaxy cluster located about 2.8 billion light-years away from Earth. Over a hundred galaxies glow in this image, but what occupies the darkness is just as intriguing. The space between those galaxies is filled with superheated gas, only visible at X-ray wavelengths. And perhaps the most mysterious part of this galaxy cluster is dark matter: a form of matter that does not interact absorb, reflect, or emit light, making it invisible to us. By observing how dark matter affects normal matter, astronomers hypothesize that the universe is made up of about 5% normal matter, 25% dark matter, and 70% dark energy. Our orbiting Hubble telescope can help us unravel cosmic mysteries like dark matter and dark energy. Galaxy clusters like this one have immense mass that can bend the fabric of spacetime itself, often creating warped and magnified images through a process called gravitational lensing. This image of Abell 209 shows subtle signs of lensing—can you spot the slight curving of galaxies within the cluster’s hazy golden glow? Astronomers measure how much these galaxies are distorted to better understand the hidden pockets of dark matter and test theories of how our universe came to be. Image description: A Hubble image of galaxy cluster Abell 209 shows a glowing concentration of multicolored galaxies. Some appear as hazy orange or gold spots, while others are light blue swirls. At the center is a dusky golden cloud around galaxies that appear slightly stretched or curved, hinting at gravitational lensing. The black background is dotted with smaller galaxies and stars. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Postman, P. Kelly #DarkEnergy #DarkMatter #Abell209 #Hubble #Spacetime #GravitationalLensing #GalaxyCluster #NASA
It’s a full moon today! 🌕 Skywatchers in most of Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia will also be well-positioned to observe a lunar eclipse, or Blood Moon. Totality will begin at about 1730 UTC and last for almost an hour and a half. The same phenomenon that makes our sky blue and our sunsets red makes the Moon appear reddish-orange as Earth’s shadow falls on the lunar surface. During a lunar eclipse, Earth is between the Sun and Moon. As sunlight passes through Earth’s air, shorter wavelengths of light — the blues and violets — are scattered throughout our planet’s atmosphere, while longer wavelengths — the reds and oranges — pass through to reach the Moon’s surface. That’s why it’s called a Blood Moon. Image descriptions: 1: A large full moon framed by silhouetted tree branches in a dark sky. 2: A partially-eclipsed Moon, half bright and half shaded deep red, and stars in a dark sky. In the foreground, tree branches reach towards the Moon. Credit: NASA/Bill Dunford #NASA #FullMoon #Moon #Eclipse #Space #Lunar #Science
This star’s nickname is nasty! No, really. With its official catalog name as NaSt1, this strange star has been given the nickname “Nasty 1.” Imaged by @NASAHubble within our own Milky Way galaxy, it lives around 3,000 light-years away from Earth and is over 10 times the mass of our Sun. When discovered, it was identified as a Wolf-Rayet star, which is a large, rapidly evolving star. This type of star quickly sheds its outer layers, exposing its hot, bright, helium-burning core. But Nasty 1 exhibited behavior that astronomers didn’t expect from a Wolf-Rayet star — instead of two lobes of gas flowing in opposite directions from the central star, Nasty 1 has a flat, swirling gaseous disk. Estimates suggest that this might be due to an unseen companion star swiping some of the debris. Scientists also estimate that the gas cloud is only a few thousand years old, and that Nasty 1 represents a brief transitory stage in the evolution of these types of stars. Image description: Nasty 1 dominates the center of the image — bright blue against its dark background. Its luminous core shines almost white in the center of its swirling disk of gas, irregular and grainy. Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Mauerhan (University of California, Berkeley) #NASA #Hubble #Stars #Universe
No more hiding, I’ll be shining, like I’m born to be! 🎶 Our @NASAWebb Space Telescope captured newborn stars forming in clouds of dust and gas (colored golden and orange in this image) in a star-forming region called Pismis 24. Though these clouds can hide stars by trapping visible light within, in the infrared, the stars shine through the nebula and together appear to glow. In the center is Pismis 24-1, an object formerly thought to be a single massive star, now known to be at least two stars. At 74 and 66 solar masses, they are some of the most massive and luminous stars ever seen. They are blasting out scorching radiation and stellar winds that are carving a cavity into the wall of the star-forming nebula clouds below and at above right. The fierce forces shaping and compressing the spires in the glowing gas at the bottom of the scene cause new stars to form. The tallest spire spans about 5.4 light-years from the bottom of the image to its top. More than 200 solar systems could fit into its tip. A note on the color choices here - cyan indicates hot or ionized hydrogen gas being heated by the massive stars. Dust molecules (similar to smoke on Earth) are represented in orange. Red signifies cooler, denser molecular hydrogen - the darker the red, the cooler the gas. Black is the densest gas; it is not emitting light. The wisps of white are dust and gas scattering starlight. Pismis 24 is one of the closest sites of massive star birth, giving scientists rare insight into the properties of hot young stars and how they evolve. Read more at the link in @NASAWebb's bio. Image description: A blue and black sky filled with stars covers about two thirds of the image. The stars are different sizes and shades of white, yellow, and orange. Across the bottom third is a mountain-like vista with spire-like peaks and deep valleys. These “mountains” appear in shades of orange, yellow, and brown. The spires go up and meet a wispy, white cloud that stretches horizontally across the scene. At the top, right corner of the image, a swath of orange and brown structure cuts diagonally across the sky. Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI #NASA #JWST #Webb #StarFormation
Gone in the blink of an eye… …on a cosmic scale, that is. This sparkly galaxy (swipe to see the full view) is home to an unusually high number of extremely hot and massive stars that seem to be on a mission to shed surplus mass as quickly as possible. These intense, brilliant stars, known as Wolf-Rayet stars, can be around 20 times as massive as the Sun, but they don’t last long on a cosmic timescale. A Wolf-Rayet star can burn up its fuel and blast its bulk out into the universe in only a few hundred thousand years. A typical star of this kind can lose a mass equal to that of our Sun in just 100,000 years! Though many of the brightest and most massive stars in the Milky Way are Wolf-Rayet stars, it is unusual to find more than a few of these stars per galaxy – except in galaxies like the one in this image. These massive stars are also incredibly hot, with surface temperatures some 10 to 40 times that of the Sun, and very luminous, glowing at tens of thousands to several million times the brightness of the Sun. Image description: This image of a star-filled galaxy is split into two parts. In the first part, you can see other galaxies dotting the darkness of space. On the right, part of a cluster of stars is visible; it looks like a silvery smudge of glitter. The starry grouping continues into the second part of the image. Also notable in this part is a very bright star with four diffraction spikes to the right of the galaxy; the spikes appear because this star is in the foreground. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA #NASA #Stars #Galaxy #Universe #Hubble
We’re going up, up, up, it’s our moment! 🎶  The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will unveil the cosmos in ways never before possible, has passed its deployment test at @NASAGoddard. The test ensures Roman’s solar panels and deployable aperture cover will unfold as planned in space. Roman, which will look for planets beyond our solar system and study essential questions in dark energy and astrophysics, is scheduled to lift off no later than May 2027 with the team aiming for as early as fall 2026. Check out the link in @NASAUniverse’s Roman story highlight to learn more!  Video description is in the comments. Video credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center  Music credit: “History in Motion” by Fred Dubois [SACEM], Koka Media [SACEM], Universal Publishing Production Music France [SACEM], and Universal Production Music #NASARoman #Astrophysics #SpaceTelescope
POV: You’re looking at the Moon outside of your window on the Orion spacecraft. This visualization simulates what the crew of Artemis II might see out the Orion windows on the day of their closest approach to the Moon. It compresses 36 hours into a little more than a minute as it flies the virtual camera on a realistic trajectory that swings the spacecraft around the Moon's far side. Next year, the Artemis II astronauts could be the first humans to see some parts of the Moon’s far side with the naked eye, depending on the spacecraft’s final trajectory after it launches. During the nine Apollo missions that left Earth’s orbit, astronauts saw parts of the Moon’s far side, but not all of it, as they were limited by which sections were lit during their orbits. The Artemis II crew’s observations will help pave the way for lunar science activities on future Artemis missions to the Moon’s surface, including Artemis III. Artemis III astronauts will investigate the landforms, rocks, and other features around their landing site. They will also collect rock samples for generations of analyses in Earth labs and set up several instruments to investigate lunar properties and resources — information critical to our future human exploration efforts. Credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio #POV #Moon #FarSideOfTheMoon #Artemis #ArtemisII #Astronauts #LunarMission #STEM #Apollo #Orion
What’s it like to fly through the International Space Station? In low Earth orbit, you don’t have to hold the camera in front of you — just push off and let momentum do the rest. Astronaut Matthew Dominick took this hands-off video during his mission to the @ISS in 2024, soaring from the aft end of the lab to the forward end of the station’s Node 2. As part of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 mission to the station, Dominick contributed to dozens of research experiments which are helping humans learn how to live in space — preparing us for @NASAArtemis missions to the Moon and Mars — while making life better back on Earth. Visit nasa.gov/iss to learn more!
✅ Left on (infra)red. Using a specific infrared wavelength of 3.29 microns, NASA’s SPHEREx mission reveals a cloud of dust in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy near the Milky Way. This image, taken just weeks after SPHEREx launched in April 2025, represents the dust cloud in visible colors, as infrared light is invisible to the human eye. A key feature of the SPHEREx mission is spectroscopy—observing individual wavelengths of light from cosmic sources to reveal the composition of objects. Different chemical elements and molecules leave unique “signatures” based on the colors they absorb and emit. Spectroscopy can also help us measure how far away galaxies are, allowing scientists to map the locations of hundreds of millions of galaxies in 3D. To reveal more about our universe, the SPHEREx mission aims to map the entire sky in 102 infrared colors, or wavelengths of light. The spacecraft will map the entire sky four times over two years, helping us build a 3D map that uncovers the secrets of our universe. Image description: An infrared image, represented in visible light, shows a dense field of stars with a cloudy region of interstellar dust in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The stars and dust cloud glow in shades of orange against the black background of space. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech #SPHEREx #Spectroscopy #Infrared #NASA #Astrophysics #DwarfGalaxy #MappingTheCosmos
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