NASA

NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick captured this photo of Hurricane Beryl in the Caribbean on July 1, 2024, while aboard the @ISS . NASA studies hurricanes from space through photos like this one, as well as observations from satellites. Hurricane first responders use this data, as well as scientists who want to understand how climate change impacts hurricanes. Hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones are all the same type of storm – tropical cyclones – and they all form the same way. When warm, moist air over the ocean rises upward from near the surface, an area of lower air pressure is created. Air from surrounding areas with higher air pressure pushes into the low-pressure area. That “new” air becomes warm and moist and rises, too. As the air rises, though, it cools off and creates clouds. The whole system of clouds and wind spins and grows, fed by the ocean’s heat and water evaporating from the surface. The distinctive “eye” of the storm is made by the system turning faster and faster. Tropical cyclones are categorized from 1-5 based on wind speed. For example, a Category 1 hurricane has winds of 74-95 mph (119-153 kph). A Category 4 hurricane, like Hurricane Beryl was at the time this image was captured, has winds of 130-156 mph (209-251 kph). Image description: A view of Hurricane Beryl from the International Space Station. The hurricane is a big white circle of clouds, with spiral arms visible at far right and bottom middle. The surrounding water is various shades of blue: lighter blue at the top and deeper blue at the bottom of the photo. Earth’s curve is visible in the back, up against the darkness of space. Credit: NASA/Matthew Dominick #NASA #SpaceStation #Hurricane #Beryl #TropicalCyclone

Vivid auroras in Jupiter’s atmosphere Eight years ago today, our @NASAHubble Space Telescope observed stunning light shows in the atmosphere of the largest planet in our solar system. Astronomers used Hubble’s ultraviolet capabilities to take this image on June 30, 2016. Auroras are created when high-energy particles enter a planet’s atmosphere near its magnetic poles and collide with atoms of gas. At the time this image was captured, our Juno spacecraft was in the solar wind near Jupiter, on its way to entering Jupiter’s orbit on July 4, 2016. While Hubble observed and measured the auroras on Jupiter, Juno measured the properties of the solar wind itself: a perfect collaboration between a telescope and a space probe. Image description: A full disc image of the planet Jupiter, with swirling cloud tops seen across the large, gas giant planet. The Great Red Spot is seen in the lower right of Jupiter, and bright purple auroras illuminate its northern polar region. Credit: NASA, @EuropeanSpaceAgency , and J. Nichols (University of Leicester) #Jupiter #SolarSystem #Aurora #NASA #Space #OTD

You’re the sunflower 🎵 Millions of light-years away in the small, northern constellation Canes Venatici, the spiral Sunflower galaxy (Messier 63) spreads its many arms – or so it seems. The Sunflower galaxy is a flocculent spiral galaxy. That means its spiral arms aren’t well defined, so it looks like there are many that appear to be winding around its yellow core. In reality, there are just two. The arms shine bright thanks to recently formed, blue–white giant stars. Star formation is one of the most important processes in shaping the universe. In addition to birthing new stars, it gives rise to planetary systems and plays a pivotal role in the evolution of galaxies. Scientists don’t fully know how stars form in flocculent spiral galaxies, so Messier 63 is a perfect one to study with images like this one from @nasahubble . Image description: Slightly right of center, the galaxy’s core glows in yellow. The galaxy’s arms spiral outward from the core, filling the image with blue-tinged gas and dust. There are bright blue dots studded throughout these spiral arms; these are young blue-white giant stars. Very little of the darkness of space can be seen in this image, except at the very bottom. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA #NASA #Hubble #ESA #Galaxy #Sunflower #Stars #Constellation #Astronomy

Go with the floe 🧊 These swirling ice floes are spinning off the shore of Greenland, as seen in this photo taken from space on June 4, 2024. Sea ice from the Arctic drifts down the Fram Strait, a 450-kilometer (280-mile)-wide passage that connects the Arctic Ocean with the Greenland Sea. Along the way, it breaks into smaller pieces and starts to melt in warmer ocean waters, creating the smoke-like swirls seen here. In recent years, more of the Arctic Ocean's sea ice has become too young and thin to make the journey south. The movement of sea ice and freshwater out of the Arctic is part of the ocean circulation patterns that distribute heat around the planet, contributing to climate conditions worldwide — so scientists are keeping a close eye on how these floes flow. Follow @NASAEarth for more updates from across our home planet. Image description: An icy shore and dark blue ocean, as seen from space. In between, chunks of ice float in the water; some are large enough to show up as discrete blocks, but others are so small that they swirl through the ocean like cream in coffee. Credit: Wanmei Liang, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview #NASA #Earth #Greenland #Iceberg #GoWithTheFlow

Dreaming of Saturn 🪐 Saturn’s graceful lanes of orbiting ice — its iconic rings — wind their way around the planet to pass beyond the horizon in this view taken on Aug. 12, 2017 by the wide-angle camera on the @NASASolarSystem Cassini spacecraft. Look closely at the upper right of this image: Saturn’s small moon Pandora (25.3 miles, or 40.7 km, in mean radius) can be seen orbiting just beyond the F ring. The image was obtained at a distance of approximately 581,000 miles (935,000 km) from Saturn. The Cassini mission, which ended on Sept. 15, 2017, after two decades in space, was a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the @EuropeanSpaceAgency ) and the Italian Space Agency. It studied Saturn and its complex system of rings and moons in unprecedented detail, returning an enormous collection of data that will continue to yield new discoveries for decades. Image description: A close-up view of Saturn in black and white looking toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 19 degrees above the ringplane. Saturn’s moon Pandora is visible as a tiny dot in the upper right of the image just beyond the F ring. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute #Saturn #SolarSystem #NASA #RingsOfInstagram #CloseUp

U GO, GOES-U! 🛰 @NOAA ’s GOES-U weather satellite launched from @NASAKennedy on June 25, 2024, at 5:26 p.m. EDT (2126 UTC) atop a @SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. GOES-U is the last in the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES)-R Series, a series of advanced satellites that provide fast, high-resolution imagery and atmospheric measurements of Earth’s Western Hemisphere, real-time mapping of lightning activity, and monitoring of solar activity and space weather. Aboard GOES-U are seven instruments, including a new, operational Compact Coronagraph-1 instrument. The coronagraph will observe the Sun’s outermost layer, called the corona, for large explosions of plasma that could produce geomagnetic solar storms. These solar storms can impact satellites and communications systems on Earth. Image descriptions: 1. A white SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying GOES-U lifts off. Flames shoot out from under it as white smoke billows around the launchpad. A tall, black structure called the gantry with criss-cross metals bars disappearing into the white smoke is in front of the rocket. A white water tower with the words “SpaceX” across the top, rounded section can be seen on the left. 2. The white rocket flies upward through the deep blue sky, flames still blazing. Credit: NASA/Amber Jean Notvest #NASA #Space #Launch #FalconHeavy #Rocket #Satellite #Liftoff #Meteorology

Rhapsody in blue 🎶 This cosmic nebula, a cloud of gas and dust where new stars are born, was spotted by our orbiting @NASAHubble telescope. Located just over 5,300 light-years from Earth, this nebula is home to a number of young, developing stars called protostars, which show up as some of the smaller sparkles in this image. The Hubble data in this image came from the telescope's Wide Field Camera 3, which peered through the nebula's cocoon of gas with near-infrared vision to study the stars within. This particular nebula is rich with hydrogen ions which are excited by the ultraviolet radiation coming from the nebula's protostars, giving it the pinkish glow seen here. Image description: A dreamlike stellar landscape, with a pinkish arc of gas standing out against dark blue swirls. A number of stars of various sizes, each accentuated by four diffraction spikes, are abundantly scattered through the image. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Tan (Chalmers University & University of Virginia), R. Fedriani #NASA #Space #Universe #Astrophotography #Hubble #HubbleTelescope #Nebula

Around the world, around the world ✨⁣ ⁣ Sixteen times each day, astronauts on the International Space Station (@ISS ) experience an orbital sunrise and sunset as the station orbits Earth. In this photo, taken by NASA astronaut Matt Dominick on June 17, 2024, the first rays of an orbital sunrise reflect off a set of roll-out solar arrays. ⁣ ⁣ The roll-out arrays are positioned over the legacy solar arrays, and have increased the station’s power generation by 30%, to support our orbiting crew who live, work, and run scientific experiments in space. ⁣ ⁣ Credit: NASA/Matt Dominick⁣ ⁣ Image description: A set of two large solar arrays, with two smaller roll-out solar arrays positioned above them, are seen almost vertically in a photograph taken from Earth’s orbit by an astronaut on the International Space Station. The rising Sun reflects bright light off the center of the roll-out arrays. Earth’s surface appears below with clouds at the right and toward the horizon. ⁣ ⁣ #NASA #SpaceStation #SolarPower #Sunrise #ViewFromYourWindow

Space potato 🥔 Phobos is the larger of Mars' two moons—but it's still only about 17 x 14 x 11 miles (27 by 22 by 18 kilometers) in diameter. Because Phobos is so small, its gravity isn't strong enough to pull it into a sphere (like Earth's Moon), giving it its lumpy shape. Phobos is also on a collision course with Mars—though it'll take a while to get there. It's nearing the Red Planet at a rate of six feet (1.8 meters) every hundred years. At that rate, the moon will either crash into Mars in 50 million years or break up into a ring. This image was taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on our Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been studying Mars since 2006. Image description: The Martian moon Phobos stands against the darkness of space. The moon is brownish-red and lumpy, pocketed with a number of craters of all sizes. A white patch is visible next to Stickney crater, a particularly large crater on its right side. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona #NASA #Space #Universe #Astrophotography #Mars #Phobos #Potato

The stars, they aligned 🎶   See how those bright red, clumpy streaks in the top left are all slanted in the same direction to the same degree? They show aligned protostellar outflows, or jets of gas from newborn stars. @NASAWebb captures this phenomenon for the first time.   “Astronomers have long assumed that as clouds collapse to form stars, the stars will tend to spin in the same direction,” said principal investigator Klaus Pontoppidan of @NASAJPL . “However, this has not been seen so directly before. These aligned, elongated structures are a historical record of the fundamental way that stars are born.”   Previously, the objects appeared as blobs or were invisible in optical wavelengths. Webb’s sensitive infrared vision was able to pierce through the thick dust, resolving the stars and their outflows.   This area is part of the Serpens Nebula. Located 1,300 light-years from Earth, it’s only 1-2 million years old — very young in cosmic terms! It’s home to a dense cluster of newly forming stars (about 100,000 years old), seen at the center of this image.   Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Klaus Pontoppidan (NASA-JPL), Joel Green (STScI)   Image description: A young star-forming region is filled with wispy orange, red, and blue layers of gas and dust. The upper left corner of the image is filled with mostly orange dust, and within that orange dust, there are several small red plumes of gas that extend from the top left to the bottom right, at the same angle. The center of the image is filled with mostly blue gas. At the center, there is one particularly bright star, that has an hourglass shadow above and below it. To the right of that is what looks a vertical eye-shaped crevice with a bright star at the center. The gas to the right of the crevice is a darker orange. Small points of light are sprinkled across the field, brightest sources in the field have extensive eight-pointed diffraction spikes that are characteristic of the Webb Telescope. #JWST #NASA #Serpens #Nebula #Stars #Align #Space #Universe

Crew aboard the @ISS captured this photo of Galveston, Texas on February 17, 2020. Galveston is where Juneteenth – the June 19 holiday celebrating the day enslaved people there learned they were freed – began.   President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, but news did not reach Confederate-controlled Galveston until April 1865, when Union troops arrived to inform the people of Texas that all enslaved people were free. As news of General Order No. 3 (issued June 19) spread, spontaneous celebrations broke out in African American churches, homes, and other gathering places. Over time, these June 19th celebrations became more formalized, becoming annual Juneteenth celebrations.   Image description: A view of Galveston and Galveston Bay from the International Space Station. Galveston is on a long strip of land that runs down the middle of the image. Streets and buildings are visible. The green water on the left is Galveston Bay, while the darker water on the right is the Gulf of Mexico.   Credit: NASA/Drew Morgan   #NASA #Galveston #Juneteenth #SpaceStation #History

What’re you looking at? 🐢 Our @NASAKennedy center is home to rockets that launch @NASAAstronauts and satellites into space—but it’s also a habitat to countless plants and animals, like this Florida redbelly turtle. Kennedy shares space with the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, which encompasses 92,000 acres of land, marsh, and water for 331 species of birds, 31 mammals, 117 fishes, and 65 amphibians and reptiles. In addition to turtles, the refuge is a wintering area for migratory birds, and a year-round home for great blue herons, great egrets, wood storks, cormorants, and brown pelicans. Image description: A turtle in its shell takes up most of this photo; the turtle is facing left, but its head is turned to the camera with a suspicious-looking expression. Its head, front legs, and shell have a mottled pattern of black and yellowish-white, while its underside is a more solid off-white. The background of the photo is mostly dark, with a few small branches and some dirt in the foreground. Credit: NASA #NASA #KennedySpaceCenter #Nature #NaturePhotography #Turtle #ILikeTurtles #TheMasterOfDisguise