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A Wider Set of Eyes on the Universe

After years of preparatory studies, we are formally starting an astrophysics mission designed to help unlock the secrets of the universe. 

Introducing…

the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, aka WFIRST.

With a view 100 times bigger than that of our Hubble Space Telescope, WFIRST will help unravel the secrets of dark energy and dark matter, and explore the evolution of the cosmos. It will also help us discover new worlds and advance the search for planets suitable for life.

WFIRST is slated to launch in the mid-2020s. The observatory will begin operations after traveling about one million miles from Earth, in a direction directly opposite the sun.

Telescopes usually come in two different “flavors” - you have really big, powerful telescopes, but those telescopes only see a tiny part of the sky. Or, telescopes are smaller and so they lack that power, but they can see big parts of the sky. WFIRST is the best of worlds.

No matter how good a telescope you build, it’s always going to have some residual errors. WFIRST will be the first time that we’re going to fly an instrument that contains special mirrors that will allow us to correct for errors in the telescope. This has never been done in space before!

Employing multiple techniques, astronomers will also use WFIRST to track how dark energy and dark matter have affected the evolution of our universe. Dark energy is a mysterious, negative pressure that has been speeding up the expansion of the universe. Dark matter is invisible material that makes up most of the matter in our universe.

Single WFIRST images will contain over a million galaxies! We can’t categorize and catalogue those galaxies on our own, which is where citizen science comes in. This allows interested people in the general public to solve scientific problems.

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

Muitas vezes as imagens nos leva a mundos internos.

by  Hisanori Manabe

🍂 Outono Tons Sons Sabores Amores.

Um olhar apenas.

Fire beneath the Stars. Volcano, HI.

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O que poderemos ver com o James Webb?

Solar System: Things to Know This Week

Learn the latest on Cassini’s Grand Finale, Pluto, Hubble Space Telescope and the Red Planet.

1. Cassini’s Grand Finale

After more than 12 years at Saturn, our Cassini mission has entered the final year of its epic voyage to the giant planet and its family of moons. But the journey isn’t over. The upcoming months will be like a whole new mission, with lots of new science and a truly thrilling ride in the unexplored space near the rings. Later this year, the spacecraft will fly repeatedly just outside the rings, capturing the closest views ever. Then, it will actually orbit inside the gap between the rings and the planet’s cloud tops.

Get details on Cassini’s final mission

The von Kármán Lecture Series: 2016

2. Chandra X-Rays Pluto

As the New Horizon’s mission headed to Pluto, our Chandra X-Ray Observatory made the first detection of the planet in X-rays. Chandra’s observations offer new insight into the space environment surrounding the largest and best-known object in the solar system’s outermost regions.

See Pluto’s X-Ray

3. … And Then Pluto Painted the Town Red

When the cameras on our approaching New Horizons spacecraft first spotted the large reddish polar region on Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, mission scientists knew two things: they’d never seen anything like it before, and they couldn’t wait to get the story behind it. After analyzing the images and other data that New Horizons has sent back from its July 2015 flight through the Pluto system, scientists think they’ve solved the mystery. Charon’s polar coloring comes from Pluto itself—as methane gas that escapes from Pluto’s atmosphere and becomes trapped by the moon’s gravity and freezes to the cold, icy surface at Charon’s pole.

Get the details

4. Pretty as a Postcard

The famed red-rock deserts of the American Southwest and recent images of Mars bear a striking similarity. New color images returned by our Curiosity Mars rover reveal the layered geologic past of the Red Planet in stunning detail. 

More images

5. Things Fall Apart

Our Hubble Space Telescope recently observed a comet breaking apart. In a series of images taken over a three-day span in January 2016, Hubble captured images of 25 building-size blocks made of a mixture of ice and dust drifting away from the comet. The resulting debris is now scattered along a 3,000-mile-long trail, larger than the width of the continental U.S.

Learn more

Discover the full list of 10 things to know about our solar system this week HERE.

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

Kiyoshi Saitō  斎藤 清 (1907 - 1997) Child in Aizu, c.1947

Lindas imagens! 

The Beautiful Things inside Your Head: Winners of the 10th Annual Art of Neuroscience Contest

Winner: Lidija Kononenko 

Artist Kononenko described this interactive piece as “a microscope specimen, a map of symptoms, and an investigation of the unknown” in a statement accompanying it. Viewers can zoom in and explore the details of a microscope image of the peripheral nerve system, which is overlaid by textual facts and poetic phrases about sleep.Sleep is “a voluntary act of losing one’s own consciousness,” Konenenko explained in her statement. The poetic snippets resemble the fragmented thoughts humans have while falling asleep. And zooming in and out of the image represents the transition between wakefulness and sleep. Additionally, 31-3594 allows the viewer to act as a pathologist, achieving the goal of blending neuroscience and art. In assessing this unique piece, the jurors praised it for “the interactivity and playful combination of imagery of a human peripheral nerve with a text-based story that unfolds at various scales and highlights the role of the nervous system in the human condition.”

Honorable Mentions

Red Haze by Nicki Coveña

A tsunami of red dots dominates this image by neuroscientist Coveña. The bright red color comes from a fluorescent protein, which was used to visualize the workings of TBR1—a gene that synthesizes the protein that regulates the information transfer from DNA to messenger RNA in vertebrate embryo development. “The out-of-focus view makes one guess at what details are hidden below,” the jurors wrote.

Motor White Matter Networks of the Human Brain by Sanja Budisavljevic

In this piece, neuroscientist Budisavljevic superimposed color onto a 19th-century black-and-white drawing of a brain based on a postmortem dissection. Each color indicates a different “highway,” or white matter pathway connecting particular regions of gray matter and allowing information to be transferred. Red indicates the most prominent highway, which links the cortex and spinal cord. “This pathway carries the messages to and from the body and allows us to function in our sensory world,” Budisavljevic says. Green represents the connection that supports coordination, and blue shows the one that regulates movements.

Bdl by Paméla Simard (Alex Tran, photographs)

Artist Simard partnered with Hunter Shaw, a neuroscientist then at McGill University, to create a series of delicate wooden sculptures. “The various installations were created from fluorescent microscopy images representing the visual system of the fruit fly brain,” Simard wrote in her statement. The intricate details of the fruit fly visual system were made possible by first laminating the thin slices of different types of wood together, then hand cutting the result to mimic the microscope images.

More Art from 2020 Gallery

Whale Retina Rainbow by Elena Vecino Cordero and Luis López Vecino

In February 2019 the death of a whale in Sopelana Beach in Spain made the local news. The beach happened to be close to the University of the Basque Country, where biologist Vecino Cordero works. Seizing the opportunity, she and some volunteers extracted the eye of the whale and took it back to her ophthalmology research group for further study. The image was produced as a part of their research. The whale’s retina was imaged using scanning electron microscopy. And later López Vecino added the colors using Adobe Photoshop.

Sensing Spin by Dan Jagger

Physiologist Jagger used a high-resolution microscope to capture this image. It shows mechanosensory hair cells located in the inner ear that play a role in the sense of balance. A protein called actin is within bundles of stereocilia and is stained yellow. Actin helps the bundles to stand upright, so when the human head turns, they can detect the movement of the fluid they are immersed in. The hair-cell nuclei are stained with cyan.

The Protection of Nature Starts in Our Mind by Robert Luck

Luck is a neuroscientist at Heidelberg University in Germany who studies the development of the cerebellum, located where the spinal cord meets the brain. Alarmed by climate change and deforestation, he created a “mind forest” that resembles bird’s-eye-view photographs of real forests. The “trees” are 65 individually traced images of mice’s Purkinje neurons, which play important roles in controlling coordination and movements. “I chose the number 65 to represent the number of years needed for the rainforest to regrow and gain back at least 80% of its diversity,” Luck wrote in his statement. “[Sixty-five] years—a human lifetime!”

Memories and Patterns: Oligodendrocytes by Shanthi Chandrasekar

Oligodendrocytes are glial cells that support and insulate long neuronal axons. The cells’ lipid membrane wraps around the axons to strengthen the structure, as well as to help neurons to send signals quickly. “A single oligodendrocyte can connect with multiple axons,” artist Chandrasekar wrote in her statement. “In this [pen-and-ink] drawing, I have tried to bring out the connectedness of the oligodendrocytes and the axons.”

Shelter in Place by Geinene Carson

As its title suggests, this piece represents “the artist’s interpretation of the pandemic experience” while sheltering in place because of COVID-19, according to artist Carson’s statement. This acrylic-on-canvas piece is a part of a series entitled Neuron, which started as “visual prayers for our daughter with a rare genetic disorder,” Carson wrote on her Web site. While Shelter in Place implies physical restrictions, Carson, who is based in Atlanta, draws inspiration from the neural network, “because as important as our physical surroundings are to our state of living, our thought life holds the key to thriving within whatever the circumstances may be,” she wrote.

Bridges between Genesis and Neuroscience: Triplets by Rui Rodrigues

This image features three neurospheres—clusters of neural stem or progenitor cells—that are similar in size and shape. Because of their similarity, neurobiologist Rodrigues entitled the piece Triplets. The vibrant colors come from “antibodies coupled with fluorescent tags to label specific proteins,” he says.

The Transfer by Geinene Carson

Motor Neuron Architectural Digest by Stefanie Hauck - University of Bonn

Illuminating The Vascular Network - EPFL by Marwan Abdellah