The Transit Method Of Detecting Extrasolar Planets

Happy International Women’s Day!

Today we celebrate International Women’s Day, a day in which we honor and recognize the contributions of women…both on Earth and in space.

Since the beginning, women have been essential to the progression and success of America’s space program.

Throughout history, women have had to overcome struggles in the workplace. The victories for gender rights were not achieved easily or quickly, and our work is not done.

Today, we strive to make sure that our legacy of inclusion and excellence lives on.

We have a long-standing cultural commitment to excellence that is largely driven by data, including data about our people. And our data shows progress is driven by questioning our assumptions and cultural prejudices – by embracing and nurturing all talent we have available, regardless of gender, race or other protected status, to build a workforce as diverse as our mission. This is how we, as a nation, will take the next giant leap in exploration.

As a world leader in science, aeronautics, space exploration and technology, we have a diverse mission that demands talent from every corner of America, and every walk of life.

So, join us today, and every day, as we continue our legacy of inclusion and excellence.

Happy International Women’s Day!

Learn more about the inspiring woman at NASA here: https://women.nasa.gov/

Enjoy this First-Year-Anniversary compilation of all of my works in one title: A Cosmic Legacy: From Earth to the Stars This title includes the following works wrapped up into one story: Further Than Before: Pathway to the Stars, Part 1 Further Than Before: Pathway to the Stars, Part 2 Pathway to the Stars: Part 1, Vesha Celeste Pathway to the Stars: Part 2, Eliza Williams Pathway to the Stars: Part 3, James Cooper Pathway to the Stars: Part 4, Universal Party Pathway to the Stars: Part 5, Amber Blythe Pathway to the Stars: Part 6, Erin Carter "Our beautiful mother world ached for a reprieve from the injustices of many, courtesy of cultures and governance systems, that forgot how to love, how to be kind, how to include others, and how to think beyond the scope of greed and power, but within the visions of shared joy and well-being." Together with the organization Eliza Williams founded, called Pathway, she and her growing team will take us on a fantastical and Utopian journey to get us out and into the farthest reaches of space. There are dilemmas such as the physiological effects of space on each of us, as well as the need for longevity and a desire to still be able to visit loved ones following long journeys. Eliza and her team develop capabilities, so we can overcome the challenges ahead and are determined to stabilize a rocky economy, wipe away suffering, violence, disease, cartels, terrorism, and trafficking in persons. They work together to tame seismic activity, weather, and fires. She and her friends tackle ways to prevent extinction and provide solutions to quality of life concerns. They even consider the longevity of our Sun and our Earth's capacity to preserve life. Eliza tackles each of these issues to get us out, and into the stars, so we can begin our biggest quest--to help our Universe breathe ever so lightly. #amazing #science #fiction #novels #best #new #books #scifi #online #read #longevity #CRISPR #physiology #neurology #physics #theoretical #philosphical #politcal #educational #STEM #AmazonAuthor #BarnesAndNobleAuthor #wellbeing #quality #biotech #nanotech #SpaceOpera #astronomy #selfpublished https://www.instagram.com/p/B2GkDbYBs0y/?igshid=ufavr7j6lsy1

Solar System: 10 Things to Know This Week

The Living Planet Edition

Whether it’s crops, forests or phytoplankton blooms in the ocean, our scientists are tracking life on Earth. Just as satellites help researchers study the atmosphere, rainfall and other physical characteristics of the planet, the ever-improving view from above allows them to study Earth’s interconnected life.

1. Life on Earth, From Space

While we (NASA) began monitoring life on land in the 1970s with the Landsat satellites, this fall marks 20 years since we’ve continuously observed all the plant life at the surface of both the land and ocean. The above animation captures the entirety of two decades of observations.

2. Watching the World Breathe

With the right tools, we can see Earth breathe. With early weather satellite data in the 1970s and ‘80s, NASA Goddard scientist Compton Tucker was able to see plants’ greening and die-back from space. He developed a way of comparing satellite data in two wavelengths.

When healthy plants are stocked with chlorophyll and ready to photosynthesize to make food (and absorb carbon dioxide), leaves absorb red light but reflect infrared light back into space. By comparing the ratio of red to infrared light, Tucker and his colleagues could quantify vegetation covering the land.

Expanding the study to the rest of the globe, the scientists could track rainy and dry seasons in Africa, see the springtime blooms in North America, and wildfires scorching forests worldwide.

3. Like Breathing? Thank Earth’s Ocean

But land is only part of the story. The ocean is home to 95 percent of Earth’s living space, covering 70 percent of the planet and stretching miles deep. At the base of the ocean’s food web is phytoplankton - tiny plants that also undergo photosynthesis to turn nutrients and carbon dioxide into sugar and oxygen. Phytoplankton not only feed the rest of ocean life, they absorb carbon dioxide - and produce about half the oxygen we breathe.

In the Arctic Ocean, an explosion of phytoplankton indicates change. As seasonal sea ice melts, warming waters and more sunlight will trigger a sudden, massive phytoplankton bloom that feeds birds, sea lions and newly-hatched fish. But with warming atmospheric temperatures, that bloom is now happening several weeks earlier - before the animals are in place to take advantage of it.

4. Keeping an Eye on Crops

The “greenness” measurement that scientists use to measure forests and grasslands can also be used to monitor the health of agricultural fields. By the 1980s, food security analysts were approaching NASA to see how satellite images could help with the Famine Early Warning System to identify regions at risk - a partnership that continues today.

With rainfall estimates, vegetation measurements, as well as the recent addition of soil moisture information, our scientists can help organizations like USAID direct emergency help.

The view from space can also help improve agricultural practices. A winery in California, for example, uses individual pixels of Landsat data to determine when to irrigate and how much water to use.

5. Coming Soon to the International Space Station

A laser-based instrument being developed for the International Space Station will provide a unique 3-D view of Earth’s forests. The instrument, called GEDI, will be the first to systematically probe the depths of the forests from space.

Another ISS instrument in development, ECOSTRESS, will study how effectively plants use water. That knowledge provided on a global scale from space will tell us “which plants are going to live or die in a future world of greater droughts,” said Josh Fisher, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and science lead for ECOSTRESS.

6. Seeing Life, From the Microscopic to Multicellular

Scientists have used our vantage from space to study changes in animal habitats, track disease outbreaks, monitor forests and even help discover a new species. Bacteria, plants, land animals, sea creatures and birds reveal a changing world.

Our Black Marble image provides a unique view of human activity. Looking at trends in our lights at night, scientists can study how cities develop over time, how lighting and activity changes during certain seasons and holidays, and even aid emergency responders during power outages caused by natural disasters.

7. Earth as Analog and Proving Ground

Just as our Mars rovers were tested in Earth’s deserts, the search for life on ocean moons in our solar system is being refined by experiments here. JPL research scientist Morgan Cable looks for life on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. She cites satellite observations of Arctic and Antarctic ice fields that are informing the planning for a future mission to Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter.

The Earth observations help researchers find ways to date the origin of jumbled, chaotic ice. “When we visit Europa, we want to go to very young places, where material from that ocean is being expressed on the surface,” she explained. “Anywhere like that, the chances of finding biomarkers goes up - if they’re there.”

8. Only One Living Planet

Today, we know of only one living planet: our own. The knowledge and tools NASA developed to study life here are among our greatest assets as we begin the search for life beyond Earth.

There are two main questions: With so many places to look, how can we home in on the places most likely to harbor life? What are the unmistakable signs of life - even if it comes in a form we don’t fully understand? In this early phase of the search, “We have to go with the only kind of life we know,” said Tony del Genio, co-lead of a new NASA interdisciplinary initiative to search for life on other worlds.

So, the focus is on liquid water. Even bacteria around deep-sea vents that don’t need sunlight to live need water. That one necessity rules out many planets that are too close or too far from their stars for water to exist, or too far from us to tell. Our Galileo and Cassini missions revealed that some moons of Jupiter and Saturn are not the dead rocks astronomers had assumed, but appear to have some conditions needed for life beneath icy surfaces.

9. Looking for Life Beyond Our Solar System

In the exoplanet (planets outside our solar system that orbit another star) world, it’s possible to calculate the range of distances for any star where orbiting planets could have liquid water. This is called the star’s habitable zone. Astronomers have already located some habitable-zone planets, and research scientist Andrew Rushby of NASA Ames Research Center is researching ways to refine the search. “An alien would spot three planets in our solar system in the habitable zone [Earth, Mars and Venus],” Rushby said, “but we know that 67 percent of those planets are not inhabited.”

He recently developed a model of Earth’s carbon cycle and combined it with other tools to study which planets in habitable zones would be the best targets to look for life, considering probable tectonic activity and water cycles. He found that larger planets are more likely than smaller ones to have surface temperatures conducive to liquid water. Other exoplanet researchers are looking for rocky worlds, and biosignatures, the chemical signs of life.

10. You Can Learn a Lot from a Dot

When humans start collecting direct images of exoplanets, even the closest ones will appear as only a handful of pixels in the detector - something like the famous “blue dot” image of Earth from Saturn. What can we learn about life on these planets from a single dot?

Stephen Kane of the University of California, Riverside, has come up with a way to answer that question by using our EPIC camera on NOAA’s DSCOVR satellite. “I’m taking these glorious pictures and collapsing them down to a single pixel or handful of pixels,” Kane explained. He runs the light through a noise filter that attempts to simulate the interference expected from an exoplanet mission. By observing how the brightness of Earth changes when mostly land is in view compared with mostly water, Kane reverse-engineers Earth’s rotation rate - something that has yet to be measured directly for exoplanets.

The most universal, most profound question about any unknown world is whether it harbors life. The quest to find life beyond Earth is just beginning, but it will be informed by the study of our own living planet.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

Interesting project. :)

How To Prove Einstein’s Relativity For Less Than $100

“But the fact that you can see cosmic ray muons at all is enough to prove that relativity is real. Think about where these muons are created: high in the upper atmosphere, about 30-to-100 kilometers above Earth’s surface. Think about how long a muon lives: about 2.2 microseconds on average. And think about the speed limit of the Universe: the speed of light, or about 300,000 kilometers per second. If you have something moving at the speed of light that only lives 2.2 microseconds, it should make it only 0.66 kilometers before decaying away. With that mean lifetime, less than 1-in-10^50 muons should reach the surface. But in reality, almost all of them make it down.”

Relativity, or the idea that space and time are not absolute, was one of the most revolutionary and counterintuitive scientific theories to come out of the 20th century. It was also one of the most disputed, with hundreds of scientists refusing to accept it. Yet with less than $100 and a single day’s worth of labor, there’s a way you can prove it to yourself: by building a cloud chamber. An old fishtank, some 100% ethyl or isopropyl alcohol, a metal base with dry ice beneath it and only a few other steps (see the full article for instructions) will allow you to construct a detector capable of seeing unstable cosmic particles. Yet these particles – and you’ll see about 1-per-second – would never reach Earth’s surface if it weren’t for relativity!

Come learn how you can validate Einstein’s first great revolution all for yourself, and silence the doubts in your mind. Nature really is this weird!

Constellations: Andromeda

Andromeda is most prominent during autumn evenings in the Northern Hemisphere, along with several other constellations named for characters in the Perseus myth.

Its brightest star, Alpha Andromedae, is a binary star that has also been counted as a part of Pegasus, while Gamma Andromedae is a colorful binary and a popular target for amateur astronomers. Only marginally dimmer than Alpha, Beta Andromedae is a red giant, its color visible to the naked eye. The constellation’s most obvious deep-sky object is the naked-eye Andromeda Galaxy (M31, also called the Great Galaxy of Andromeda), the closest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way and one of the brightest Messier objects. 

In this image of the Andromeda Galaxy, Messier 32 is to the left of the center.

Several fainter galaxies, including M31’s companions M110 and M32, as well as the more distant NGC 891, lie within Andromeda. The Blue Snowball Nebula, a planetary nebula, is visible in a telescope as a blue circular object. 

NGC 891, as taken with amateur equipment

Along with the Andromeda Galaxy and its companions, the constellation also features NGC 891 (Caldwell 23), a smaller galaxy just east of Almach. It is a barred spiral galaxy seen edge-on, with a dark dust lane visible down the middle. 

In addition to the star clusters NGC 752 and NGC 7686, there is also the planetary nebula NGC 7662.

Each November, the Andromedids meteor shower appears to radiate from Andromeda. The shower peaks in mid-to-late November every year, but has a low peak rate of fewer than two meteors per hour. Astronomers have often associated the Andromedids with Biela’s Comet, which was destroyed in the 19th century, but that connection is disputed. source

I'm very much looking forward to this. ☺

Two Webb instruments well suited for detecting exoplanet atmospheres

The best way to study the atmospheres of distant worlds with the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in late 2018, will combine two of its infrared instruments, according to a team of astronomers.

“We wanted to know which combination of observing modes (of Webb) gets you the maximum information content for the minimum cost,” says Natasha Batalha, graduate student in astronomy and astrophysics and astrobiology, Penn State, and lead scientist on this project.

“Information content is the total amount of information we can get from a planet’s atmospheric spectrum, from temperature and composition of the gas - like water and carbon dioxide - to atmospheric pressures.”

Batalha and Michael Line, assistant professor, School of Earth and Space Science, Arizona State University, developed a mathematical model to predict the quantity of information that different Webb instruments could extract about an exoplanet’s atmosphere.

Their model predicts that using a combination of two infrared instruments - the Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) and the G395 mode on the Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) - will provide the highest information content about an exoplanet’s atmosphere.

Read more ~ SpaceDaily

Image: Inspecting JWST’s primary mirror.     Credit: NASA–C. Gunn

Now, together, Part 1, Vesha Celeste, and Part 2, Eliza Williams, have been paired together, and are available for those interested in the types of science, the directions of science, and the speculation that leads to well-being and quality of life, feel free to follow, message, and share ideas, and be a part of a positive future where, if we so choose, we can navigate the stars. This is just the beginning of this series and prequel, “Pathway to the Stars,” to a giant series, “Further than Before!” Please enjoy. https://www.amazon.com/author/matthewopdyke #sciencefiction #scifi #sciencefictionfantasy #scififantasy #politicalscifi #politicalsciencefiction #strongfemalelead #utopian #technologyidealism #neuroscience #nanotech #nanotechnology #physics #theoreticalphysics #problemresolution #apoliticalscifi #biology #CRISPR #stemcellresearch #geneticmodification https://www.instagram.com/p/BpUMW6ZgB1I/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1nhhhf9ev7vpq

#Christmas with @k1mberly0 and #matthewopdyke #strongfemalelead #strongmalerolemodel #physiology #neuroscience #physics #theoreticalphysics #biotechnology #nanotechnology #longevity #CRISPR #politicalsciencefiction #furtherthanbefore #authorsofinstagram #scifi #sciencefictionnovels https://www.amazon.com/author/matthewopdyke https://www.instagram.com/p/BqnJwmYgEIL/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1sphrn7bybdvh