AMAZING TRANSIT: Yesterday (May 22nd) in Switzerland, Thierry Legault photographed the International Space Station (ISS) and space shuttle Atlantis passing directly in front of the sun. The docked spacecraft were framed by "solar fire" as they raced by new sunspot 1072:

View the full-disk transit

"I have never had such good seeing conditions and this image surpasses any transit image I've done before," says Legault. "The sunspot area is also very sharp." He recorded the split-second transit using a solar-filtered 6" refracting telescope.

NASA's shuttle program is coming to an end later this year, and Atlantis is making her final scheduled visit to the ISS. For this reason, the STS-132 mission patch shows Atlantis heading into the sunset. There is, however, a possibility that Atlantis might fly again. If so, make that sunset a solar transit.

Thierry Legault's picture is absolutely amazing. This is my new favorite space picture.

@dmgerbino

ALIEN BEAUTY: Multiwavelength images of the sun beamed to Earth by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) have a beauty that can only be described as ... alien. We've never seen the sun quite like this before. Consider the following picture taken just hours ago by SDO's Atmospheric Imaging Assembly:

The image is a composite of three extreme ultraviolet wavelengths: 211 Å (false-color red) 193 Å (green) and 171 Å (blue), each tracing a different gas temperature ranging from 1 to more than 2 million degrees K. Highlights of today's sun include an enormous magnetic filament, a coronal hole, and a new sunspot: labels. And that's just for starters. The

Hubble Finds a Star Eating a Planet

05.20.10

> View larger
Artist's concept of the exoplanet WASP-12b.
Credit: NASA/ESA/G. Bacon

The hottest known planet in the Milky Way galaxy may also be its shortest-lived world. The doomed planet is being eaten by its parent star, according to observations made by a new instrument on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS). The planet may only have another 10 million years left before it is completely devoured.

The planet, called WASP-12b, is so close to its sunlike star that it is superheated to nearly 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit and stretched into a football shape by enormous tidal forces. The atmosphere has ballooned to nearly three times Jupiter's radius and is spilling material onto the star. The planet is 40 percent more massive than Jupiter.

This effect of matter exchange between two stellar objects is commonly seen in close binary star systems, but this is the first time it has been seen so clearly for a planet.

"We see a huge cloud of material around the planet, which is escaping and will be captured by the star. We have identified chemical elements never before seen on planets outside our own solar system," says team leader Carole Haswell of The Open University in Great Britain.

Haswell and her science team's results were published in the May 10, 2010 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

A theoretical paper published in the science journal Nature last February by Shu-lin Li of the Department of Astronomy at the Peking University, Beijing, first predicted that the planet's surface would be distorted by the star's gravity, and that gravitational tidal forces make the interior so hot that it greatly expands the planet's outer atmosphere. Now Hubble has confirmed this prediction.

WASP-12 is a yellow dwarf star located approximately 600 light-years away in the winter constellation Auriga. The exoplanet was discovered by the United Kingdom's Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) in 2008. The automated survey looks for the periodic dimming of stars from planets passing in front of them, an effect called transiting. The hot planet is so close to the star it completes an orbit in 1.1 days.

The unprecedented ultraviolet (UV) sensitivity of COS enabled measurements of the dimming of the parent star's light as the planet passed in front of the star. These UV spectral observations showed that absorption lines from aluminum, tin, manganese, among other elements, became more pronounced as the planet transited the star, meaning that these elements exist in the planet's atmosphere as well as the star's. The fact the COS could detect these features on a planet offers strong evidence that the planet's atmosphere is greatly extended because it is so hot.

The UV spectroscopy was also used to calculate a light curve to precisely show just how much of the star's light is blocked out during transit. The depth of the light curve allowed the COS team to accurately calculate the planet's radius. They found that the UV-absorbing exosphere is much more extended than that of a normal planet that is 1.4 times Jupiter's mass. It is so extended that the planet's radius exceeds its Roche lobe, the gravitational boundary beyond which material would be lost forever from the planet's atmosphere.

What is an exoplanet or extrasolar planet? It is a planet found outside our solar system. According to research posted at wikipedia.org ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet ), "as of 18 May 2010, astronomers have made confirmed detections of 455 such planets." That is so wild.

Most of us do not realize how busy astronomers have been over the last few decades. I hope you found this information interesting too.

@dmgerbino

Lost: A giant belt of brown clouds big enough to swallow Earth twenty times over. If found, please return to Jupiter.

May 20, 2010: In a development that has transformed the appearance of the solar system's largest planet, one of Jupiter's two main cloud belts has completely disappeared.

"This is a big event," says planetary scientist Glenn Orton of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. "We're monitoring the situation closely and do not yet fully understand what's going on."

These side by side images of Jupiter taken by Australian astrophotographer Anthony Wesley show the SEB in August 2009, but not in May 2010.Individual images: Aug. 4, 2009; May 8, 2010.

Known as the South Equatorial Belt (SEB), the brown cloudy band is twice as wide as Earth and more than twenty times as long. The loss of such an enormous "stripe" can be seen with ease halfway across the solar system.

"In any size telescope, or even in large binoculars, Jupiter's signature appearance has always included two broad equatorial belts," says amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley of Australia. "I remember as a child seeing them through my small backyard refractor and it was unmistakable. Anyone who turns their telescope on Jupiter at the moment, however, will see a planet with only one belt--a very strange sight."

Wesley is a veteran observer of Jupiter, famous for his discovery of a comet hitting the planet in 2009. Like many other astronomers, he noticed the belt fading late last year, "but I certainly didn't expect to see it completely disappear," he says. "Jupiter continues to surprise."

Orton thinks the belt is not actually gone, but may be just hiding underneath some higher clouds.

Without the SEB present, Jupiter's Great Red Spot is surrounded by almost uninterrupted white. Anthony Wesley took this picture on May 18, 2010. [larger image]

"It's possible," he hypothesizes, "that some 'ammonia cirrus' has formed on top of the SEB, hiding the SEB from view." On Earth, white wispy cirrus clouds are made of ice crystals. On Jupiter, the same sort of clouds can form, but the crystals are made of ammonia (NH3) instead of water (H20).

What would trigger such a broad outbreak of "ammonia cirrus"? Orton suspects that changes in global wind patterns have brought ammonia-rich material into the clear, cold zone above the SEB, setting the stage for formation of the high-altitude, icy clouds.

"I'd love to send a probe in there to find out what's really going on."

Indeed, Jupiter's atmosphere is a mysterious place which would benefit from exploration. No one knows, for instance, why the Great Red Spot is red—or what has sustained the raging storm for so many years. Neither does theory explain why the twin equatorial belts are brown, nor why one should vanish while the other remains. "We have a long list of questions," says Orton.

This isn't the first time the SEB has faded out.

"The SEB fades at irregular intervals, most recently in 1973-75, 1989-90, 1993, 2007, 2010," says John Rogers, director of the British Astronomical Association's Jupiter Section. "The 2007 fading was terminated rather early, but in the other years the SEB was almost absent, as at present."

The return of the SEB can be dramatic.

Jupiter beckons to amateur astronomers from the pre-dawn sky. Lyle Anderson of Duluth, Minnesota, took this picture on May 19, 2010. [larger image] [sky map]

"We can look forward to a spectacular outburst of storms and vortices when the 'SEB Revival' begins," says Rogers. "It always begins at a single point, and a disturbance spreads out rapidly around the planet from there, often becoming spectacular even for amateurs eyeballing the planet through medium-sized telescopes. However we can't predict when or where it will start. On historical precedent it could be any time in the next 2 years. We hope it will be in the next few months so that everyone can get a good view.

"I'll be watching every chance I get," says Wesley. "The revival will likely be sudden and dramatic, with planet-circling groups of storms appearing over the space of just a week or so."

Indeed, says Orton, "anyone could be the first to spot the return of the SEB."

Jupiter shines in the eastern sky before dawn: sky map. Point your optics at the "morning star" and … is that really Jupiter? Happy hunting!

Author: Dr. Tony Phillips | Credit: Science@NASA

More Information
Anthony Wesley's images of Jupiter show the evolution of the SEB in recent months What Hit Jupiter? -- (Science@NASA) Juno -- NASA's next mission to Jupiter is scheduled for launch in 2011.

So the South Equatorial Belt (SEB) has faded again. Awesome! If you are up super early in the morning look up in the sky for Jupiter. You can not miss it. Growing up, Jupiter was my favorite planet to explore with my 6" Newtonian telescope. I was able to see the bands and the great red spot with this scope.

@dmgerbino

John Yembrick
Headquarters, Washington     
202-358-1100
john.yembrick-1@nasa.gov

  Josh Byerly
Johnson Space Center, Houston
281-483-5111
josh.byerly@nasa.gov  

Feb. 04, 2010

RELEASE : 10-035

NASA Invites Public To Tweet Their Way Into Space Next Week

HOUSTON -- The Twitterverse and universe will converge during space shuttle Endeavour's upcoming mission to the International Space Station. NASA is inviting the public to send questions for the astronauts via Twitter and have them answered live from space.

Astronaut Mike Massimino will be accepting questions for the crew from the public via his Twitter account until Thursday, Feb. 11. Massimino will be a shuttle Capcom, or spacecraft communicator, at NASA's Mission Control in Houston during Endeavour's flight, scheduled for launch Feb. 7.

At 2:24 a.m. CST on Feb. 11, Massimino will host an interactive event with the crew from his console in Mission Control. He will ask the astronauts as many submitted and live questions as practical during the 20-minute event. The shuttle will be docked to the station during the live question and answer session. The event with Endeavour's crew will be broadcast live on the Web and NASA Television.

The public is invited to start tweeting questions for Endeavour's crew today to Massimino's Twitter account, @astro_Mike, or add the hashtag #askastro to their tweets.

Endeavour's 13-day STS-130 mission will include three spacewalks and the delivery of the Tranquility node, the final module of the U.S. portion of the station. Tranquility will provide additional room for crew members and many of the space station's life support and environmental control systems.

Attached to Tranquility is a cupola, which houses a robotic control station and has seven windows. The windows will provide a panoramic view of Earth, celestial objects and visiting spacecraft. After the node and cupola are added, the orbiting laboratory will be approximately 90 percent complete.

The time and day of the Twitter session are subject to change due to mission priorities. Updates to the NASA TV event schedule are available online at:

http://www.nasa.gov/shuttletv

For additional NASA TV streaming video, scheduling and downlink information, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

For information about Endeavour and the STS-130 mission, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle  

- end -

This should be a really fun Twitter event.