7 Sports Astronauts Love Without Gravity (Including Football)

What’s Up For September 2018?

Outstanding views Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Mars with the naked eye!

You'll have to look quickly after sunset to catch Venus. And through binoculars or a telescope, you'll see Venus's phase change dramatically during September - from nearly half phase to a larger thinner crescent!

Jupiter, Saturn and Mars continue their brilliant appearances this month. Look southwest after sunset.

Use the summer constellations help you trace the Milky Way.

Sagittarius: where stars and some brighter clumps appear as steam from the teapot.

Aquila: where the Eagle's bright Star Altair, combined with Cygnus's Deneb, and Lyra's Vega mark the Summer Triangle. 

Cassiopeia, the familiar "w"- shaped constellation completes the constellation trail through the Summer Milky Way. Binoculars will reveal double stars, clusters and nebulae. 

Between September 12th and the 20th, watch the Moon pass from near Venus, above Jupiter, to the left of Saturn and finally above Mars! 

Both Neptune and brighter Uranus can be spotted with some help from a telescope this month.

Look at about 1:00 a.m. local time or later in the southeastern sky. You can find Mercury just above Earth's eastern horizon shortly before sunrise. Use the Moon as your guide on September 7 and 8th.

And although there are no major meteor showers in September, cometary dust appears in another late summer sight, the morning Zodiacal light. Try looking for it in the east on moonless mornings very close to sunrise. To learn more about the Zodiacal light, watch "What's Up" from March 2018.

Watch the full What’s Up for September Video: 

There are so many sights to see in the sky. To stay informed, subscribe to our What’s Up video series on Facebook.

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Dolphins x Astronauts: The collab we didn't know we needed 

A pod of curious dolphins added extra meaning and porpoise to the recovery of Crew-9′s SpaceX Dragon capsule and its four explorers shortly after splashdown. Inside the capsule were astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams, Butch Wilmore, and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, who splashed down off the coast of Florida at 5:57pm ET (2127 UTC) on March 18, 2025, concluding their scientific mission to the International Space Station. See Crew-9 return from deorbit to splashdown in this video. (The dolphins appear at 1:33:56.)

Celebrating Spitzer, One of NASA’s Great Observatories

As the Spitzer Space Telescope’s 16-year mission ends, we’re celebrating the legacy of our infrared explorer. It was one of four Great Observatories – powerful telescopes also including Hubble, Chandra and Compton – designed to observe the cosmos in different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Light our eyes can see

The part of the spectrum we can see is called, predictably, visible light. But that’s just a small segment of all the wavelengths of the spectrum. The Hubble Space Telescope observes primarily in the visible spectrum. Our Chandra X-ray Observatory is designed to detect (you guessed it) X-ray emissions from very hot regions of the universe, like exploded stars and matter around black holes. Our Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, retired in 2000, produced the first all-sky survey in gamma rays, the most energetic and penetrating form of light.

Then there’s infrared…

Infrared radiation, or infrared light, is another type of energy that we can't see but can feel as heat. All objects in the universe emit some level of infrared radiation, whether they're hot or cold. Spitzer used its infrared instrument to make discoveries in our solar system (including Saturn's largest ring) all the way to the edge of the universe. From stars being born to planets beyond our solar system (like the seven Earth-size exoplanets around the star TRAPPIST-1), Spitzer's science discoveries will continue to inspire the world for years to come.

Multiple wavelengths

Together, the work of the Great Observatories gave us a more complete view and understanding of our universe.

Hubble and Chandra will continue exploring our universe, and next year they’ll be joined by an even more powerful observatory … the James Webb Space Telescope!

Many of Spitzer's breakthroughs will be studied more precisely with the Webb Space Telescope. Like Spitzer, Webb is specialized for infrared light. But with its giant gold-coated beryllium mirror and nine new technologies, Webb is about 1,000 times more powerful. The forthcoming telescope will be able to push Spitzer's science findings to new frontiers, from identifying chemicals in exoplanet atmospheres to locating some of the first galaxies to form after the Big Bang.

We can’t wait for another explorer to join our space telescope superteam!

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AI, Cancer Therapy and Chemical Gardens Headed to Space Station

A new batch of science is headed to the International Space Station aboard the SpaceX Dragon on the company’s 15th mission for commercial resupply services. The spacecraft will deliver science that studies the use of artificial intelligence, plant water use all over the planet, gut health in space, more efficient drug development and the formation of inorganic structures without the influence of Earth’s gravity. 

Take a look at five investigations headed to space on the latest SpaceX resupply:

Credits: DLR

As we travel farther into space, the need for artificial intelligence (AI) within a spacecraft increases.

Credits: DLR

Mobile Companion, a European Space Agency (ESA) investigation, explores the use of AI as a way to mitigate crew stress and workload during long-term spaceflight.

Credits: DLR

Plants regulate their temperature by releasing water through tiny pores on their leaves. If they have sufficient water they can maintain their temperature, but if water is insufficient their temperatures rise. This temperature rise can be measured with a sensor in space.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

ECOSTRESS measures the temperature of plants and uses that information to better understand how much water plants need and how they respond to stress.

Credits: Northwestern University

Spaceflight has an on impact many bodily systems. Rodent Research-7 takes a look at how the microgravity environment of space affects the community of microoganisms in the gastrointestinal tract, or microbiota.

The study also evaluates relationships between system changes, such as sleep-wake cycle disruption, and imbalance of microbial populations, to identify contributing factors and supporting development of countermeasures to protect astronaut health during long-term missions, as well as to improve the treatment of gastrointestinal, immune, metabolic and sleep disorders on Earth.

Credits: Angiex

Cardiovascular diseases and cancer are the leading causes of death in developed countries. Angiex Cancer Therapy examines whether microgravity-cultured endothelial cells represent a valid in vitro model to test effects of vascular-targeted agents on normal blood vessels.

Results may create a model system for designing safer drugs, targeting the vasculature of cancer tumors and helping pharmaceutical companies design safer vascular-targeted drugs.

Credits: Oliver Steinbock chemistry group at Florida State University

Chemical Gardens are structures that grow during the interaction of metal salt solutions with silicates, carbonates or other selected anions. Their growth characteristics and attractive final shapes form from a complex interplay between reaction-diffusion processes and self-organization.

Credits: Oliver Steinbock chemistry group at Florida State University

On Earth, gravity-induced flow due to buoyancy differences between the reactants complicates our understanding of the physics behind these chemical gardens. Conducting this experiment in a microgravity environment ensures diffusion-controlled growth and allows researchers a better assessment of initiation and evolution of these structures.

These investigations join hundreds of others currently happening aboard the orbiting laboratory. 

For daily updates, follow @ISS_Research, Space Station Research and Technology News or our Facebook. For opportunities to see the space station pass over your town, check out Spot the Station.

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Navigating Deep Space by Starlight

On August 6, 1967, astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell noticed a blip in her radio telescope data. And then another. Eventually, Bell Burnell figured out that these blips, or pulses, were not from people or machines.

The blips were constant. There was something in space that was pulsing in a regular pattern, and Bell Burnell figured out that it was a pulsar: a rapidly spinning neutron star emitting beams of light. Neutron stars are superdense objects created when a massive star dies. Not only are they dense, but neutron stars can also spin really fast! Every star we observe spins, and due to a property called angular momentum, as a collapsing star gets smaller and denser, it spins faster. It’s like how ice skaters spin faster as they bring their arms closer to their bodies and make the space that they take up smaller.

The pulses of light coming from these whirling stars are like the beacons spinning at the tops of lighthouses that help sailors safely approach the shore. As the pulsar spins, beams of radio waves (and other types of light) are swept out into the universe with each turn. The light appears and disappears from our view each time the star rotates.

After decades of studying pulsars, astronomers wondered—could they serve as cosmic beacons to help future space explorers navigate the universe? To see if it could work, scientists needed to do some testing!

First, it was important to gather more data. NASA’s NICER, or Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer, is a telescope that was installed aboard the International Space Station in 2017. Its goal is to find out things about neutron stars like their sizes and densities, using an array of 56 special X-ray concentrators and sensitive detectors to capture and measure pulsars’ light.

But how can we use these X-ray pulses as navigational tools? Enter SEXTANT, or Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology. If NICER was your phone, SEXTANT would be like an app on it.  

During the first few years of NICER’s observations, SEXTANT created an on-board navigation system using NICER’s pulsar data. It worked by measuring the consistent timing between each pulsar’s pulses to map a set of cosmic beacons.

When calculating position or location, extremely accurate timekeeping is essential. We usually rely on atomic clocks, which use the predictable fluctuations of atoms to tick away the seconds. These atomic clocks can be located on the ground or in space, like the ones on GPS satellites. However, our GPS system only works on or close to Earth, and onboard atomic clocks can be expensive and heavy. Using pulsar observations instead could give us free and reliable “clocks” for navigation. During its experiment, SEXTANT was able to successfully determine the space station’s orbital position!

We can calculate distances using the time taken for a signal to travel between two objects to determine a spacecraft’s approximate location relative to those objects. However, we would need to observe more pulsars to pinpoint a more exact location of a spacecraft. As SEXTANT gathered signals from multiple pulsars, it could more accurately derive its position in space.

So, imagine you are an astronaut on a lengthy journey to the outer solar system. You could use the technology developed by SEXTANT to help plot your course. Since pulsars are reliable and consistent in their spins, you wouldn’t need Wi-Fi or cell service to figure out where you were in relation to your destination. The pulsar-based navigation data could even help you figure out your ETA!

None of these missions or experiments would be possible without Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s keen eye for an odd spot in her radio data decades ago, which set the stage for the idea to use spinning neutron stars as a celestial GPS. Her contribution to the field of astrophysics laid the groundwork for research benefitting the people of the future, who yearn to sail amongst the stars.  

Keep up with the latest NICER news by following NASA Universe on X and Facebook and check out the mission’s website. For more on space navigation, follow @NASASCaN on X or visit NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation website.  

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What caused this outburst of this star named V838 Mon? For reasons unknown, this star’s outer surface suddenly greatly expanded with the result that it became the brightest star in the entire Milky Way Galaxy in January 2002. Then, just as suddenly, it faded. A stellar flash like this had never been seen before – supernovas and novas expel matter out into space.

Although the V838 Mon flash appears to expel material into space, what is seen in the above GIF from the Hubble Space Telescope is actually an outwardly moving light echo of the bright flash.

In a light echo, light from the flash is reflected by successively more distant rings in the complex array of ambient interstellar dust that already surrounded the star. V838 Mon lies about 20,000 light years away toward the constellation of the unicorn (Monoceros), while the light echo above spans about six light years in diameter.

Credit: NASA, ESA

To discover more, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2472.html

A Wrinkle in Space-Time: The Eclipse That “Proved” Einstein Right

One hundred years ago a total solar eclipse turned an obscure scientist into a household name. You might have heard of him — his name is Albert Einstein. But how did a solar eclipse propel him to fame?

First, it would be good to know a couple things about general relativity. (Wait, don’t go! We’ll keep this to the basics!)

A decade before he finished general relativity, Einstein published his special theory of relativity, which demonstrates how space and time are interwoven as a single structure he dubbed “space-time.” General relativity extended the foundation of special relativity to include gravity. Einstein realized that gravitational fields can be understood as bends and curves in space-time that affect the motions of objects including stars, planets — and even light.

For everyday situations the centuries-old description of gravity by Isaac Newton does just fine. However, general relativity must be accounted for when we study places with strong gravity, like black holes or neutron stars, or when we need very precise measurements, like pinpointing a position on Earth to within a few feet. That makes it hard to test!

A prediction of general relativity is that light passing by an object feels a slight "tug", causing the light's path to bend slightly. The more mass the object has, the more the light will be deflected. This sets up one of the tests that Einstein suggested — measuring how starlight bends around the Sun, the strongest source of gravity in our neighborhood. Starlight that passes near the edge of the Sun on its way to Earth is deflected, altering by a small amount where those stars appear to be. How much? By about the width of a dime if you saw it at a mile and a quarter away! But how can you observe faint stars near the brilliant Sun? During a total solar eclipse!

That’s where the May 29, 1919, total solar eclipse comes in. Two teams were dispatched to locations in the path of totality — the places on Earth where the Moon will appear to completely cover the face of the Sun during an eclipse. One team went to South America and another to Africa.

On eclipse day, the sky vexed both teams, with rain in Africa and clouds in South America. The teams had only mere minutes of totality during which to take their photographs, or they would lose the opportunity until the next total solar eclipse in 1921! However, the weather cleared at both sites long enough for the teams to take images of the stars during totality.

The teams took two sets of photographs of the same patch of sky – one set during the eclipse and another set a few months before or after, when the Sun was out of the way. By comparing these two sets of photographs, researchers could see if the apparent star positions changed as predicted by Einstein. This is shown with the effect exaggerated in the image above.

A few months after the eclipse, when the teams sorted out their measurements, the results demonstrated that general relativity correctly predicted the positions of the stars. Newspapers across the globe announced that the controversial theory was proven (even though that’s not quite how science works). It was this success that propelled Einstein into the public eye.

The solar eclipse wasn’t the first test of general relativity. For more than two centuries, astronomers had known that Mercury’s orbit was a little off. Its perihelion — the point during its orbit when it is closest to the Sun — was changing faster than Newton’s laws predicted. General relativity easily explains it, though, because Mercury is so close to the Sun that its orbit is affected by the Sun’s dent in space-time, causing the discrepancy.  

In fact, we still test general relativity today under different conditions and in different situations to see whether or not it holds up. So far, it has passed every test we’ve thrown at it.

Curious to know where we need general relativity to understand objects in space? Tune into our Tumblr tomorrow to find out!

You can also read more about how our understanding of the universe has changed during the past 100 years, from Einstein's formulation of gravity through the discovery of dark energy in our Cosmic Times newspaper series.

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

Around the World in Seven Ground Stations

Happy Birthday, Jules Verne!

Considered by many to be the father of science fiction, French novelist Jules Verne takes his readers on a “From the Earth to the Moon,” “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” and “Around the World in Eighty Days.” In his honor, let’s take our own journey around the world, exploring seven far-flung ground stations and the communications networks they support. These ground stations downlink data from science and exploration missions, maintaining the critical link from space to ground.

Our Deep Space Network supports far-out missions like Voyager 1, a spacecraft that's now over 13 billion miles from Earth. To communicate that far, the Network uses antennas as large as 230 feet in diameter. The network has ground stations in Pasadena, California; Madrid, Spain; and this one in Canberra, Australia. The ground stations are strategically placed for maximum coverage of the night sky, ensuring that deep space missions can communicate their data back to Earth. Check out that lizard!

Our Space Network uses relay satellites in conjunction with ground stations to provide continuous communications coverage for satellites in low-Earth orbit like the International Space Station, enabling 24/7 connection with astronauts onboard. Spacecraft using the Space Network beam their data to the constellation of Tracking and Data Relay Satellites, which forward that data to the ground. This is a photo of a Space Network ground station in Guam, a U.S. territory. The spherical structures around the antennas are called “radomes” and protect the antennas from the tropical storms!

Optical communications uses lasers to provide missions with higher data rates than radio communications. Optical terminals also offer missions reduced size, weight and power requirements over comparable radio antennas. A smaller system leaves more room for science instruments, a weight reduction can mean a less expensive launch and reduced power allows batteries to last longer. This ground station in Haleakalā, Hawaii, will relay data to California through a groundbreaking optical communications satellite, the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration. The demonstration will show the power and promise of optical communications to support the next generation of science missions.

Antarctica may seem like an odd place for radio antennas, but McMurdo Ground Station is vitally important to our networks. In 2017, we used the McMurdo ground station to demonstrate a new technology called Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN), sending a selfie from McMurdo to the space station through numerous DTN nodes. DTN protocols allow data to be stored at points along its route that do not have an open connection to the next intermediary, preventing data loss and improving data returns.

This Near Earth Network ground station in Santiago, Chile, might not be our only South American ground station for long. The Near Earth Network is considering Punta Arenas, Chile, as a possible location for Ka-band antennas, which would provide missions with higher data rates. The Near Earth Network is also experimenting with Ka-band arraying, which uses multiple smaller antennas to provide the same capabilities of a larger, Ka-band antenna. Ka-band services will greatly increase the amount of science data we can gather!

If the space station ever has communications trouble, we could communicate with our astronauts through emergency very high frequency (VHF) communications ground stations like this one in Wallops Island, Virginia. VHF offers voice-only, contingency communications for the station and the Soyuz spacecraft, which ferries astronauts to and from the station. We maintain two VHF stations strategically placed to maximize contact with the space station as it orbits above North America. International partners operate VHF stations that provide contacts as the station orbits above Asia and Europe. NASA’s segment of the VHF network recently underwent critical upgrades that improve the reliability and durability of the system.

This beautiful photo captures Near Earth Network antennas in Svalbard, Norway, beneath the glow of the Northern lights, a phenomenon that occurs when charged particles from the Sun interact with various gasses in Earth’s atmosphere. If one were to visit Iceland, one could see these same lights above Snæfellsjökull volcano, featured in Jules Verne’s “A Journey to the Center of the Earth” as the imaginary entrance to a subterranean world.

A lot has changed in the nearly two centuries since Jules Verne was born. Verne’s 1865 novel “From the Earth to the Moon” and its 1870 sequel “Around the Moon” imagine a giant cannon capable of launching three men into lunar orbit. These imaginary astronauts used opera glasses to survey the lunar surface before returning safely to Earth.

Such a story may seem ridiculous in an age where humanity has occupied space for decades and satellites explore distant worlds with increasing regularity, but Verne’s dreams of spaceflight were novel ­– if not revolutionary – at the time. This change in worldview reflects humanity’s inexorable technological progress and our mission at NASA to turn science fiction into science fact.

As the next generation of exploration commences, our ever-evolving communications capabilities rise to meet the demands of missions that dreamers like Verne could hardly imagine.

The seven ground stations featured here were just a taste of our communications infrastructure. To learn more about space communications, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/SCaN

Say hello to the Butterfly Nebula 👋

It looks like our Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of a peaceful, cosmic butterfly unfurling its celestial wings, but the truth is vastly more violent. In the Butterfly Nebula, layers of gas are being ejected from a dying star. Medium-mass stars grow unstable as they run out of fuel, which leads them to blast tons of material out into space at speeds of over a million miles per hour!

Streams of intense ultraviolet radiation cause the cast-off material to glow, but eventually the nebula will fade and leave behind only a small stellar corpse called a white dwarf. Our middle-aged Sun can expect a similar fate once it runs out of fuel in about six billion years.

Planetary nebulas like this one aren’t actually related to planets; the term was coined by astronomer William Herschel, who actually discovered the Butterfly Nebula in 1826. Through his small telescope, planetary nebulas looked like glowing, planet-like orbs. While stars that generate planetary nebulas may have once had planets orbiting them, scientists expect that the fiery death throes these stars undergo will ultimately leave any planets in their vicinity completely uninhabitable.

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From the vantage point of the International Space Station, astronaut Shane Kimbrough (@astro_kimbrough) captured this image over the Earth, writing “Looking west over the Red Sea, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.  #EarthArt from the amazing space station.”

The space station serves as the world's laboratory for conducting cutting-edge microgravity research, and is the primary platform for technology development and testing in space to enable human and robotic exploration of destinations beyond low-Earth orbit, including asteroids and Mars.