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By cabinsinthewoods

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The Running Chicken Nebula comprises several clouds, all of which we can see in this vast image from the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), hosted at ESO’s Paranal site. This 1.5-billion pixel image spans an area in the sky of about 25 full Moons. The clouds shown in wispy pink plumes are full of gas and dust, illuminated by the young and hot stars within them.

Credit: ESO

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Water, Water Everywhere; We Track Drops to Drink!

When we think about what makes a planet habitable, we’re often talking about water. With abundant water in liquid, gas (vapor) and solid (ice) form, Earth is a highly unusual planet. Almost 70% of our home planet’s surface is covered in water!

But about 97% of Earth’s water is salty – only a tiny amount is freshwater: the stuff humans, pets and plants need to survive.

Water on our planet is constantly moving, and not just geographically. Water shifts phases from ice to water to vapor and back, moving through the planet’s soils and skies as it goes.

That’s where our satellites come in.

Look at the Midwestern U.S. this spring, for example. Torrential rain oversaturated the soil and overflowed rivers, which caused severe flooding, seen by Landsat.

Our satellites also tracked a years-long drought in California. Between 2013 and 2014, much of the state turned brown, without visible green.  

It’s not just rain. Where and when snow falls – and melts – is changing, too. The snow that falls and accumulates on the ground is called snowpack, which eventually melts and feeds rivers used for drinking water and crop irrigation. When the snow doesn’t fall, or melts too early, communities go without water and crops don’t get watered at the right time.

Even when water is available, it can become contaminated by blooms of phytoplankton, like cyanobacteria . Also known as blue-green algae, these organisms can make humans sick if they drink the water. Satellites can help track algae from space, looking for the brightly colored blooms against blue water.

Zooming even farther back, Earth’s blue water is visible from thousands of miles away. The water around us makes our planet habitable and makes our planet shine blue among the darkness of space.

Knowing where the water is, and where it’s going, helps people make better decisions about how to manage it. Earth’s climate is changing rapidly, and freshwater is moving as a result. Some places are getting drier and some are getting much, much wetter. By predicting droughts and floods and tracking blooms of algae, our view of freshwater around the globe helps people manage their water.

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

Flower of the Dead, essence of Aztec Marigold. Always loved October and November, The colors and essence of autumn.

Ten interesting facts about Jupiter

Here is a list of some interesting facts about the planet Jupiter. A planet that catches the attention of all, by its size, storms and its surprising moons.

The mass of Jupiter is 318 times as massive as the Earth. In fact, Jupiter is 2.5 times more massive than all of the other planets in the Solar System combined.

Its gravity is so strong that a rocket would have to go an unthinkable 135,000 mph to leave.

The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is one of its most familiar features. This persistent anticyclonic storm, which is located south of its equator, measures between 24,000 km in diameter and 12–14,000 km in height. As such, it is large enough to contain two or three planets the size of Earth’s diameter. And the spot has been around for at least 350 years, since it was spotted as far back as the 17th century.

Jupiter’s rings were discovered in 1979 by the passing Voyager 1 spacecraft, but their origin was a mystery. Data from the Galileo spacecraft that orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003 later confirmed that these rings were created by meteoroid impacts on small nearby moons.

Extending up to seven million kilometers in the Sun’s direction and almost to the orbit of Saturn in the opposite direction, Jupiter’s magnetosphere is the largest and most powerful of any planetary magnetosphere in the Solar System, and by volume the largest known continuous structure in the Solar System after the heliosphere.

Jupiter has a total of 69 natural satellites. The four largest are: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. However, it is estimated that the planet has over 200 natural satellites orbiting it. Almost all of them are less than 10 kilometers in diameter, and were only discovered after 1975, when the first spacecraft (Pioneer 10) arrived at Jupiter.

Jupiter Has Been Visited 8 Times By Spacecraft. Jupiter was first visited by NASA’s Pioneer 10 spacecraft in December 1973, and then Pioneer 11 in December 1974. Then came the Voyager 1 and 2 flybys, both of which happened in 1979. This was followed by a long break until Ulysses arrived in February 1992, followed by the Galileo space probe in 1995. Then Cassini made a flyby in 2000, on its way to Saturn. And finally, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made its flyby in 2007. NASA’s Juno spacecraft is currently orbiting Jupiter.

Jupiter is the third brightest object in the Solar System, after Venus and the Moon.

Jupiter Is The Fastest Spinning Planet In The Solar System. For all its size and mass, Jupiter sure moves quickly. In fact, with an rotational velocity of 12.6 km/s (~7.45 m/s) or 45,300 km/h (28,148 mph), the planet only takes about 10 hours to complete a full rotation on its axis. And because it’s spinning so rapidly, the planet has flattened out at the poles a little and is bulging at its equator.

Jupiter Cannot Become A Star. Astronomers call Jupiter a failed star, but that’s not really an appropriate description. While it is true that, like a star, Jupiter is rich in hydrogen and helium, Jupiter does not have nearly enough mass to trigger a fusion reaction in its core. This is how stars generate energy, by fusing hydrogen atoms together under extreme heat and pressure to create helium, releasing light and heat in the process.

This is made possible by their enormous gravity. For Jupiter to ignite a nuclear fusion process and become a star, it would need more than 70 times its current mass. If you could crash dozens of Jupiters together, you might have a chance to make a new star. But in the meantime, Jupiter shall remain a large gas giant with no hopes of becoming a star. Sorry, Jupiter!

Sources: universetoday and wikipedia

Images credits: Wikimedia Commons, JAXA, NASA, ESA, Hubble, Wang Letian & Michael Carroll

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Autumn 2024 is almost here!