NASA Astronaut Reid Wiseman shared this image of Yosemite via his twitter account this morning. Wiseman later tweeted: “We cranked up our #Soyuz this morning and test fired all the thrusters. Everything worked flawlessly – ready for a Sunday departure.” – @astro_reid

The homebound Expedition 40/41 trio, consisting of Soyuz Commander Max Suraev and Flight Engineers Alexander Gerst and Wiseman, is counting down to its Nov. 9 departure inside the Soyuz TMA-13M spacecraft. They are packing gear to be returned home while they continue science and maintenance on the U.S. side of the International Space Station.

Back on Earth, the new Expedition 42/43 crew is getting ready for its launch to the space station from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Nov. 23. Soyuz Commander Anton Shkaplerov will be joined by NASA astronaut Terry Virts and European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti aboard a Soyuz TMA-15M spacecraft to begin a 5-1/2 month mission aboard the orbital laboratory.

Space Station Blog.

Image Credit: NASA/Reid Wiseman via NASA http://ift.tt/1zAm7QT

An active region on the sun emitted a mid-level solar flare, peaking at 4:47 a.m. EST on Nov. 5, 2014. This is the second mid-level flare from the same active region, labeled AR 12205, which rotated over the left limb of the sun on Nov. 3. The image was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in extreme ultraviolet light that was colorized in red and gold.

Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth’s atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however — when intense enough — they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel.

This flare is classified as an M7.9-class flare. M-class flares are a tenth the size of the most intense flares, the X-class flares. The number provides more information about its strength. An M2 is twice as intense as an M1, an M3 is three times as intense, etc.

More information on NASA’s SDO Mission.

Image Credit: NASA/SDO via NASA http://ift.tt/1pqwcwv

On Dec. 4, Orion is scheduled to launch atop a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 37 in Florida. During the test, Orion will travel 3,600 miles in altitude above Earth. 4 1/2 hours later, the spacecraft will reenter the atmosphere at 20,000 mph and splash down in the Pacific Ocean. Orion’s first flight will verify launch and high-speed reentry systems such as avionics, attitude control, parachutes and the heat shield.

Four recently-installed protective panels make up Orion’s Ogive. The Ogive reduces drag and acoustic load on the crew module, making it a smoother ride for the spacecraft. Pictured here, inside the Launch Abort System Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a crane brings the fourth and final Ogive panel closer for installation on Orion’s Launch Abort System.

The Ogive installation was one of the last pieces of the puzzle for Orion prior to its move to the launch pad on Nov. 10. There, it will be lifted and attached to the rocket for its December launch.

More on Orion.

Image Credit: NASA via NASA http://ift.tt/1y3NPRZ

A potent weather system with origins in Manitoba, Canada moved south across the Great Lakes on Halloween and blew all the way to Florida, bringing snow and hard frost to regions that do not see either in some winters. The storm system then moved back up the U.S. East Coast and pounded New England with a Nor’easter.

This image shows the southern Appalachian Mountain range, along the border of Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina, as fall color was turned to winter white. The natural-color image was acquired by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite on the Suomi NPP satellite on Nov. 2, 2014.

Six inches of snow fell in Asheville, North Carolina, where snow usually doesn’t fall before Christmas. Higher in the mountains, near Gatlinburg, Tennessee, LeConte Lodge (elevation 6400 feet) reported 22 inches of snow and temperatures of 9 degrees Fahrenheit. In Columbia, South Carolina, measurable snow fell nine days earlier than ever recorded for that city.

More information.

Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory via NASA http://ift.tt/1x3Hasz

Glaciers and mountains in the evening sun are seen on an Operation IceBridge research flight, returning from West Antarctica on Oct. 29, 2014.

NASA is carrying out its sixth consecutive year of Operation IceBridge research flights over Antarctica to study changes in the continent’s ice sheet, glaciers and sea ice. This year’s airborne campaign revisits a section of the Antarctic ice sheet that recently was found to be in irreversible decline.

IceBridge uses a suite of instruments that includes a laser altimeter, radar instruments, cameras, and a gravimeter, which is an instrument that detects small changes in gravity. These small changes reveal how much mass these glaciers have lost. Researchers plan to measure previously unsurveyed regions of Antarctica, such as the upper portions of Smith Glacier in West Antarctica, which is thinning faster than any other glaciers in the region. The mission also plans to collect data in portions of the Antarctic Peninsula, such as the Larsen C, George VI and Wilkins ice shelves and the glaciers that drain into them. The Antarctic Peninsula has been warming faster than the rest of the continent.

In addition to extending the data record of NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), which stopped collecting data in 2009, IceBridge will also help set the stage for ICESat-2 by measuring ice the satellite will fly over.

> Operation IceBridge Antarctic 2014 Campaign

Image Credit: NASA/Michael Studinger via NASA http://ift.tt/1tzK9rQ

This near-infrared, color mosaic from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shows the sun glinting off of Titan’s north polar seas. While Cassini has captured, separately, views of the polar seas (see PIA17470) and the sun glinting off of them (see PIA12481 and PIA18433) in the past, this is the first time both have been seen together in the same view.

The sunglint, also called a specular reflection, is the bright area near the 11 o’clock position at upper left. This mirror-like reflection, known as the specular point, is in the south of Titan’s largest sea, Kraken Mare, just north of an island archipelago separating two separate parts of the sea.

This particular sunglint was so bright as to saturate the detector of Cassini’s Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) instrument, which captures the view. It is also the sunglint seen with the highest observation elevation so far — the sun was a full 40 degrees above the horizon as seen from Kraken Mare at this time — much higher than the 22 degrees seen in PIA18433. Because it was so bright, this glint was visible through the haze at much lower wavelengths than before, down to 1.3 microns.

The southern portion of Kraken Mare (the area surrounding the specular feature toward upper left) displays a “bathtub ring” — a bright margin of evaporate deposits — which indicates that the sea was larger at some point in the past and has become smaller due to evaporation. The deposits are material left behind after the methane & ethane liquid evaporates, somewhat akin to the saline crust on a salt flat.

The highest resolution data from this flyby — the area seen immediately to the right of the sunglint — cover the labyrinth of channels that connect Kraken Mare to another large sea, Ligeia Mare. Ligeia Mare itself is partially covered in its northern reaches by a bright, arrow-shaped complex of clouds. The clouds are made of liquid methane droplets, and could be actively refilling the lakes with rainfall.

The view was acquired during Cassini’s August 21, 2014, flyby of Titan, also referred to as “T104” by the Cassini team.

The view contains real color information, although it is not the natural color the human eye would see. Here, red in the image corresponds to 5.0 microns, green to 2.0 microns, and blue to 1.3 microns. These wavelengths correspond to atmospheric windows through which Titan’s surface is visible. The unaided human eye would see nothing but haze, as in PIA12528.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The VIMS team is based at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

More information about Cassini is available at http://ift.tt/ZjpQgB and http://ift.tt/Jcddhk.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/University of Idaho via NASA http://ift.tt/1s0kCnh

This Chandra X-ray Observatory image of the Hydra A galaxy cluster was taken on Oct. 30, 1999, with the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS) in an observation that lasted about six hours. Hydra A is a galaxy cluster that is 840 million light years from Earth. The cluster gets its name from the strong radio source, Hydra A, that originates in a galaxy near the center of the cluster. Optical observations show a few hundred galaxies in the cluster. Chandra X-ray observations reveal a large cloud of hot gas that extends throughout the cluster. The gas cloud is several million light years across and has a temperature of about 40 million degrees in the outer parts decreasing to about 35 million degrees in the inner region.

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory was launched into space fifteen years ago aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia. Since its deployment on July 23, 1999, Chandra has helped revolutionize our understanding of the universe through its unrivaled X-ray vision. Chandra, one of NASA’s current “Great Observatories,” along with the Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope, is specially designed to detect X-ray emission from hot and energetic regions of the universe.

Image Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO via NASA http://ift.tt/1DCG9ru

NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman posted this image of a sunrise, captured from the International Space Station, to social media on Oct. 29, 2014. Wiseman wrote, “Not every day is easy. Today was a tough one.”

Wiseman was referring to the loss on Oct. 28 of the Orbital Sciences Corporation Antares rocket and Cygnus spacecraft, moments after launch at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The Cygnus spacecraft was filled with about 5,000 pounds of supplies slated for the International Space Station, including science experiments, experiment hardware, spare parts, and crew provisions.

The station crew is in no danger of running out of food or other critical supplies.

Image Credit: NASA/Reid Wiseman via NASA http://ift.tt/1rAyUKd

The Flight Loads Laboratory at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center is celebrating 50 years. It sprang into existence during the era of the X-15 rocket plane and the
YF-12 and SR-71 Blackbirds, and was dedicated to testing the latest in high-speed flight.

In this image from 1971, the YF-12 forebody’s radiant heating system is being tested at the Flight Loads Laboratory under conditions experienced at Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound, over 2,000 miles an hour. Eventually the entire airframe was tested in the lab, always with the goal to collect data, validate parts and reduce risk to the aircraft and the pilots who flew them.

Image credit: NASA

Read More About the Flight Loads Laboratory Anniversary
Read About Modern Aeronautics Testing in the Flight Loads Laboratory via NASA http://ift.tt/1zJyN90

This trick that the planet is looking back at you is actually a Hubble treat: An eerie, close-up view of Jupiter, the biggest planet in our solar system. Hubble was monitoring changes in Jupiter’s immense Great Red Spot (GRS) storm on April 21, 2014, when the shadow of the Jovian moon, Ganymede, swept across the center of the storm. This gave the giant planet the uncanny appearance of having a pupil in the center of a 10,000 mile-diameter “eye.” For a moment, Jupiter “stared” back at Hubble like a one-eyed giant Cyclops. Click on the image to view Jupiter from a distance.

Image Credit: NASA/ESA/A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center)
Caption: Ray Villard, Space Science Telescope Institute
Acknowledgment: C. Go and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) via NASA http://ift.tt/1323kAq