A massive winter storm is coming together as two low pressure systems are merging over the U.S. East Coast. A satellite image from NOAA's GOES-13 satellite on Feb. 8 shows a western frontal system approaching the coastal low pressure area. The satellite image, captured at 9:01 a.m. EST, shows clouds associated with the western frontal system stretching from Canada through the Ohio and Tennessee valleys, into the Gulf of Mexico. The comma-shaped low pressure system located over the Atlantic, east of Virginia, is forecast to merge with the front and create a powerful nor'easter. The National Weather Service expects the merged storm to move northeast and drop between two to three feet of snow in parts of New England. Credit: NASA(More at NASA Picture Of The Day)
This image was taken from NOAA's GOES-13 satellite on Saturday, Feb. 9, at 7:01 a.m. EST. Two low pressure systems came together and formed a giant nor'easter centered right over New England creating blizzards from Massachusetts to New York. the image was created by NASA's GOES Project at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Image credit: NASA/GOES Project (More at NASA Picture Of The Day)
The United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket with the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) spacecraft onboard is seen on Sunday, Feb. 10, 2013 at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.The Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) mission is a collaboration between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey that will continue the Landsat program's 40-year data record of monitoring the Earth's landscapes from space. The spacecraft is scheduled to launch Feb. 11.Photo Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls(More at NASA Picture Of The Day)
The United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas-V rocket with the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) spacecraft onboard is seen as it launches on Monday, Feb. 11, 2013 at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. The Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) mission is a collaboration between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey that will continue the Landsat Program's 40-year data record of monitoring the Earth's landscapes from space. Image Credit: United Launch Alliance (More at NASA Picture Of The Day)
This rectangular version of a self-portrait of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity combines dozens of exposures taken by the rover's Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) during the 177th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars (Feb. 3, 2013). The rover is positioned at a patch of flat outcrop called "John Klein," which was selected as the site for the first rock-drilling activities by Curiosity. The self-portrait was acquired to document the drilling site. The rover's robotic arm is not visible in the mosaic. MAHLI, which took the component images for this mosaic, is mounted on a turret at the end of the arm. Wrist motions and turret rotations on the arm allowed MAHLI to acquire the mosaic's component images. The arm was positioned out of the shot in the images or portions of images used in the mosaic. Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, developed, built and operates MAHLI. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project and the mission's Curiosity rover for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The rover was designed and assembled at JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Image Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS (More at NASA Picture Of The Day)
Bobak Ferdowsi, Flight Director, Mars Curiosity Rover, answers questions from Scholastic News young reporter Emily Shao prior to the start of the first-ever State of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Event (SoSTEM) held at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2013 in Washington. Ferdowsi, also commonly known as "Mohawk Guy," was part of a panel that took questions from a crowd of STEM students. Image Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls (More at NASA Picture Of The Day)
Generations of stars can be seen in this infrared portrait from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. In this wispy star-forming region, called W5, the oldest stars can be seen as blue dots in the centers of the two hollow cavities (other blue dots are background and foreground stars not associated with the region). Younger stars line the rims of the cavities, and some can be seen as pink dots at the tips of the elephant-trunk-like pillars. The white knotty areas are where the youngest stars are forming. Red shows heated dust that pervades the region's cavities, while green highlights dense clouds. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian (More at NASA Picture Of The Day)
This is an image of magnetic loops on the sun, captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). It has been processed to highlight the edges of each loop to make the structure more clear.A series of loops such as this is known as a flux rope, and these lie at the heart of eruptions on the sun known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs.) This is the first time scientists were able to discern the timing of a flux rope's formation. (Blended 131 Angstrom and 171 Angstrom images of July 19, 2012 flare and CME.) Image Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO (More at NASA Picture Of The Day)
The Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, Dragon spacecraft stands inside a processing hangar at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Teams had just installed the spacecraft's solar array fairings. NASA and its international partners are targeting Friday, March 1, as the launch date for the next cargo resupply flight to the International Space Station by SpaceX. Launch is scheduled for 10:10 a.m. EST from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. SpaceX's Dragon capsule will be filled with about 1,200 pounds of supplies for the space station crew and experiments being conducted aboard the orbiting laboratory. Image credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett (More at NASA Picture Of The Day)
I see a lot of potential in privatised space travel. According to SpaceX NASA could save billions by just renting SpaceX rockets whenever they wanted to launch.
It pains me that I'm not qualified to move to America and work for SpaceX.
Astronaut John Glenn inspects artwork that will be painted on the outside of his Mercury spacecraft, which he nicknamed Friendship 7. On Feb. 20, 1962, Glenn lifted off into space aboard his Mercury Atlas (MA-6) rocket to become the first American to orbit the Earth. After orbiting the Earth three times, Friendship 7 landed in the Atlantic Ocean, just East of Grand Turk Island in the Bahamas. Glenn and his capsule were recovered by the Navy Destroyer Noa, 21 minutes after splashdown. Image Credit: NASA (More at NASA Picture Of The Day)
Marshall Porterfield, Life and Physical Sciences Division Director at NASA Headquarters, talks about the human body in microgravity and other life sciences at a NASA Social exploring science on the International Space Station at NASA Headquarters, Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2013 in Washington. The Vegetable Production System ("Veggie"), a container used for growing plants on the ISS, is pictured in the foreground. Veggie is a deployable plant growth unit capable of producing salad-type crops to provide the crew with a palatable, nutritious, and safe source of fresh food and a tool to support relaxation and recreation. Veggie provides lighting and nutrient delivery, but utilizes the cabin environment for temperature control and as a source of carbon dioxide to promote growth. Image Credit: NASA/Carla Cioffi (More at NASA Picture Of The Day)
This colorful view of Mercury was produced by using images from the color base map imaging campaign during MESSENGER's primary mission. These colors are not what Mercury would look like to the human eye, but rather the colors enhance the chemical, mineralogical, and physical differences between the rocks that make up Mercury's surface. Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington(More at NASA Picture Of The Day)
Saturn's north polar hexagon basks in the Sun's light now that spring has come to the northern hemisphere. Many smaller storms dot the north polar region and Saturn's signature rings, which appear to disappear on account of Saturn's shadow, put in an appearance in the background. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft's wide-angle camera on Nov. 27, 2012 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 750 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 403,000 miles (649,000 kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 21 degrees. Image scale is 22 miles (35 kilometers) per pixel. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute(More at NASA Picture Of The Day)
The Whirlpool Galaxy is a classic spiral galaxy. At only 30 million light years distant and fully 60 thousand light years across, M51, also known as NGC 5194, is one of the brightest and most picturesque galaxies on the sky. This image is a digital combination of a ground-based image from the 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory and a space-based image from the Hubble Space Telescope highlighting sharp features normally too red to be seen. Image Credit: NASA/Hubble (More at NASA Picture Of The Day)
In late February 2013, a major snowstorm made its way across the continental United States, dropping snow from Colorado to the Great Lakes region. The National Weather Service reported snow totals of five to eight inches in many parts of the Central Plains and Upper Mississippi River Valley. Some parts of the Central Plains experienced snowfall rates as high as four inches per hour, along with thundersnow. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite captured this nighttime view at 1:55 a.m. CST on February 23. This imagery is from the VIIRS "day-night band," which detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared. The day-night band takes advantage of moonlight, airglow, and starlight to brighten the landscape and uses filtering techniques to observe signals such as city lights and snow cover. On the night of this image, the Moon was nearly full. City lights glow like clusters of stars against a backdrop of grey and black in this image. The snow appears medium gray, and stretches from northern Texas to the Dakotas, and from the Rocky Mountain states eastward past Chicago. When VIIRS acquired this image, snow cover across multiple states had persisted since the previous night.<em>Image Credit: NASA/Suomi NPP (More at NASA Picture Of The Day)
NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope orbits our planet every 95 minutes, building up increasingly deeper views of the universe with every circuit. This image compresses eight individual frames, from a movie showing 51 months of position and exposure data by Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT), into a single snapshot. The pattern reflects numerous motions of the spacecraft, including its orbit around Earth, the precession of its orbital plane, the manner in which the LAT nods north and south on alternate orbits, and more. The LAT sweeps across the entire sky every three hours, capturing the highest-energy form of light -- gamma rays -- from sources across the universe. These range from supermassive black holes billions of light-years away to intriguing objects in our own galaxy, such as X-ray binaries, supernova remnants and pulsars. Image Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration(More at NASA Picture Of The Day)
It may look like something from "The Lord of the Rings," but this fiery swirl is actually a planetary nebula known as ESO 456-67. Set against a backdrop of bright stars, the rust-colored object lies in the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer), in the southern sky.In this image of ESO 456-67, it is possible to see the various layers of material expelled by the central star. Each appears in a different hue - red, orange, yellow, and green-tinted bands of gas are visible, with clear patches of space at the heart of the nebula. It is not fully understood how planetary nebulae form such a wide variety of shapes and structures; some appear to be spherical, some elliptical, others shoot material in waves from their polar regions, some look like hourglasses or figures of eight, and others resemble large, messy stellar explosions - to name but a few.Image Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA(More at NASA Picture Of The Day)
Space Exploration Technologies' Falcon 9 rocket lifts off Space Launch Complex 40 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 10:10 a.m. EST on Friday, March 1, 2013, carrying a Dragon capsule filled with cargo. The SpaceX Dragon capsule is making its third trip to the International Space Station, following a demonstration flight in May 2012 and the first resupply mission in October 2012. The SpaceX-2 mission is the second of 12 SpaceX flights contracted by NASA to resupply the orbiting laboratory. Image Credit: NASA (More at NASA Picture Of The Day)
