by Dr. Tony Phillips

This GALEX UV image of the colliding Antennae Galaxies shows areas of active star formation, which is not in the tidal tails as one might expect.

People worry about asteroids. Being hit by a space rock can really ruin your day. But that's nothing. How would you like to be hit by a whole galaxy?

It could happen. Astronomers have long known that the Andromeda Galaxy is on a collision course with the Milky Way. In about 3 billion years, the two great star systems will crash together. Earth will be in the middle of the biggest wreck in our part of the Universe.

Astronomer John Hibbard isn't worried. “Galaxy collisions aren't so bad,” he says. A typical spiral galaxy contains a hundred billion stars, yet when two such behemoths run into each other “very few stars collide. The stars are like pinpricks with lots of space between them. The chance of a direct hit, star vs. star, is very low.”

Hibbard knows because he studies colliding galaxies, particularly a nearby pair called the Antennae. “The two galaxies of the Antennae system are about the same size and type as Andromeda and the Milky Way.” He believes that the Antennae are giving us a preview of what's going to happen to our own galaxy.

The Antennae get their name from two vast streamers of stars that resemble the feelers on top of an insect's head. These streamers, called “tidal tails,” are created by gravitational forces—one galaxy pulling stars from the other. The tails appear to be scenes of incredible violence.

But looks can be deceiving: “Actually, the tails are quiet places,” says Hibbard. “They're the peaceful suburbs of the Antennae.” He came to this conclusion using data from GALEX, an ultraviolet space telescope launched by NASA in 2003.

The true violence of colliding galaxies is star formation. While individual stars rarely collide, vast interstellar clouds of gas do smash together. These clouds collapse. Gravity pulls the infalling gas into denser knots until, finally, new stars are born. Young stars are difficult to be around. They emit intensely unpleasant radiation and tend to “go supernova.”

GALEX can pinpoint hot young stars by the UV radiation they emit and, in combination with other data, measure the rate of star birth. “Surprisingly,” Hibbard says, “star formation rates are low in the tidal tails, several times lower than what we experience here in the Milky Way.” The merging cores of the Antennae, on the other hand, are sizzling with new stars, ready to explode.

So what should you do when your galaxy collides? A tip from GALEX: head for the tails.

To see more GALEX images, visit www.galex.caltech.edu. Kids can read about galaxies and how a telescope can be a time machine at spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/educators/galex_puzzles.pdf.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

By Dr. Tony Phillips

The shortest airline routes from the Eastern U.S. to popular destinations in Asia go very near the magnetic North Pole, where space weather is of greatest concern.

At a time when much of the airline industry is struggling, one type of air travel is doing remarkably well: polar flights. In 1999, United Airlines made just twelve trips over the Arctic. By 2005, the number of flights had grown to 1,402. Other airlines report similar growth.

The reason for the increase is commerce. Business is booming along Asia's Pacific Rim, and business travel is booming with it. On our spherical Earth, the shortest distance from Chicago to Beijing or New York to Tokyo is over the North Pole. Suddenly, business travelers are spending a lot of time in the Arctic.

With these new routes, however, comes a new concern: space weather.

“Solar storms have a big effect on polar regions of our planet,” explains Steve Hill of NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado. Everyone knows about the Northern Lights, but there's more to it than that: “When airplanes fly over the poles during solar storms, they can experience radio blackouts, navigation errors and computer reboots — all caused by space radiation.”

In 2005, United Airlines reported dozens of flights diverted from polar routes by nasty space weather. Delays ranged from 8 minutes to nearly 4 hours, and each unplanned detour burned expensive fuel. Money isn't the only concern: Pilots and flight attendants who fly too often over the poles could absorb more radiation than is healthy. “This is an area of active research — figuring out how much exposure is safe for flight crews,” says Hill. “Clearly, less is better.”

To help airlines avoid bad space weather, NOAA has begun equipping its GOES weather satellites with improved instruments to monitor the Sun. Recent additions to the fleet, GOES 12 and 13, carry X-ray telescopes that take spectacular pictures of sunspots, solar flares, and coronal holes spewing streams of solar wind in our direction. Other GOES sensors detect solar protons swarming around our planet, raising alarms when radiation levels become dangerous.

“Our next-generation satellite will be even better,” says Hill. Slated for launch in 2014, GOES-R will be able to photograph the Sun through several different X-ray and ultra-violet filters. Each filter reveals a somewhat different layer of the Sun's explosive atmosphere — a boon to forecasters. Also, advanced sensors will alert ground controllers to a variety of dangerous particles near Earth, including solar protons, heavy ions and galactic cosmic rays.

“GOES-R should substantially improve our space weather forecasts,” says Hill. That means friendlier skies on your future trips to Tokyo.

For the latest space weather report, visit the website of the Space Weather Prediction Center at http://www.sec.noaa.gov/. For more about the GOES-R series spacecraft, see http://goespoes.gsfc.nasa.gov/goes/spacecraft/r_spacecraft.html. For help in explaining geostationary orbits to kids — or anyone else — visit The Space Place at http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/goes/goes_poes_orbits.shtml.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

by Dr. Tony Phillips

The top half of this image is part of a series of images of a passing dust devil on Mars caught by Spirit. In the bottom half, the image has been filtered to remove everything that did not change from one image to the other. Notice the faint track left by the dust devil. Credit NASA/JPL/Mark T. Lemmon, Univ. of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.

Admit it. Whenever you see a new picture of Mars beamed back by Spirit or Opportunity, you scan the rocks to check for things peeking out of the shadows. A pair of quivering green antennas, perhaps, or a little furry creature crouched on five legs…? Looking for Martians is such a guilty pleasure.

Well, you can imagine the thrill in 2004 when scientists were checking some of those pictures and they did see something leap out. It skittered across the rocky floor of Gusev Crater and quickly disappeared. But it wasn't a Martian; Spirit had photographed a dust devil!

Dust devils are tornadoes of dust. On a planet like Mars which is literally covered with dust, and where it never rains, dust devils are an important form of weather. Some Martian dust devils grow almost as tall as Mt. Everest, and researchers suspect they're crackling with static electricity — a form of “Martian lightning.”

NASA is keen to learn more. How strong are the winds? Do dust devils carry a charge? When does “devil season” begin — and end? Astronauts are going to want to know the answers before they set foot on the red planet.

The problem is, these dusty twisters can be devilishly difficult to catch. Most images of Martian dust devils have been taken by accident, while the rovers were looking for other things. This catch-as-catch-can approach limits what researchers can learn.

No more! The two rovers have just gotten a boost of artificial intelligence to help them recognize and photograph dust devils. It comes in the form of new software, uploaded in July and activated in September 2006.

“This software is based on techniques developed and tested as part of the NASA New Millennium Program's Space Technology 6 project. Testing was done in Earth orbit onboard the EO-1 (Earth Observing-1) satellite,” says Steve Chien, supervisor of JPL's Artificial Intelligence Group. Scientists using EO-1 data were especially interested in dynamic events such as volcanoes erupting or sea ice breaking apart. So Chien and colleagues programmed the satellite to notice change. It worked beautifully: “We measured a 100-fold increase in science results for transient events.”

Now that the techniques have been tested in Earth orbit, they are ready to help Spirit and Opportunity catch dust devils — or anything else that moves — on Mars.

“If we saw Martians, that would be great,” laughs Chien. Even scientists have their guilty pleasures.

Find out more about the Space Technology 6 “Autonomous Sciencecraft” technology experiment at nmp.nasa.gov/st6/TECHNOLOGY/sciencecraft_tech.html, and the use of the technology on the Mars Rovers at nmp.nasa.gov/TECHNOLOGY/infusion.html. Kids can visit spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/nmp_action.shtml and do a New Millennium Program-like test at home to see if a familiar material would work well in space

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

By Diane K. Fisher and Tony Phillips

CloudSat is one of the Earth observing satellites collecting data that will help develop and refine atmospheric circulation models and other types of weather and climate models. CloudSat's unique radar system reads the vertical structure of clouds, including liquid water and ice content, and how clouds affect the distribution of the Sun's energy in the atmosphere. To see animation of this data simulation, Click Here.

The story goes that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can, over time, cause a tornado in Kansas. The “butterfly effect” is a common term to evoke the complexity of interdependent variables affecting weather around the globe. It alludes to the notion that small changes in initial conditions can cause wildly varying outcomes.

Now imagine millions of butterflies flapping their wings. And flies and crickets and birds. Now you understand why weather is so complex.

All kidding aside, insects are not in control. The real “butterfly effect” is driven by, for example, global winds and ocean currents, polar ice (melting and freezing), clouds and rain, and blowing desert dust. All these things interact with one another in bewilderingly complicated ways.

And then there's the human race. If a butterfly can cause a tornado, what can humans cause with their boundlessly reckless disturbances of initial conditions?

Understanding how it all fits together is a relatively new field called Earth system science. Earth system scientists work on building and fine–tuning mathematical models (computer programs) that describe the complex inter–relationships of Earth's carbon, water, energy, and trace gases as they are exchanged between the terrestrial biosphere and the atmosphere. Ultimately, they hope to understand Earth as an integrated system, and model changes in climate over the next 50–100 years. The better the models, the more accurate and detailed will be the image in the crystal ball.

NASA's Earth System Science program provides real–world data for these models via a swarm of Earth–observing satellites. The satellites, which go by names like Terra and Aqua, keep an eye on Earth's land, biosphere, atmosphere, clouds, ice, and oceans. The data they collect are crucial to the modeling efforts.

Some models aim to predict short–term effects — in other words, weather. They may become part of severe weather warning systems and actually save lives. Other models aim to predict long–term effects — or climate. But, long–term predictions are much more difficult and much less likely to be believed by the general population, since only time can actually prove or disprove their validity. After all, small errors become large errors as the model is left to run into the future. However, as the models are further validated with near– and longer–term data, and as different models converge on a common scenario, they become more and more trustworthy to show us the future while we can still do something about it — we hope.

For a listing and more information on each of NASA's (and their partners') Earth data–gathering missions, visit science.hq.nasa.gov/missions/earth.html. Kids can get an easy introduction to Earth system science and play Earthy word games at spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/earth/wordfind.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

By Dr. Tony Phillips

In case it is ever found by intelligent beings elsewhere in the galaxy, Voyager carries a recording of images and sounds of Earth and its inhabitants. The diagrams on the cover of the recording symbolize Earth's location in the galaxy and how to play the record.

Tonight, when the sun sets and the twilight fades to black, go outside and look southwest. There's mighty Jupiter, gleaming brightly. It looks so nearby, yet Jupiter is 830 million km away. Light from the sun takes 43 minutes to reach the giant planet, and for Earth's fastest spaceship, New Horizons, it's a trip of 13 months.

That's nothing.

Not far to the left of Jupiter is Pluto. Oh, you won't be able to see it. Tiny Pluto is almost 5 billion km away. Sunlight takes more than 4 hours to get there, and New Horizons 9 years. From Pluto, the sun is merely the brightest star in a cold, jet-black sky.

That's nothing.

A smidgen to the right of Pluto, among the stars of the constellation Ophiuchus, is Voyager 1. Launched from Florida 29 years ago, the spacecraft is a staggering 15 billion km away. It has traveled beyond all the known planets, beyond the warmth of the sun, almost beyond the edge of the solar system itself…

Now that's something.

“On August 15, 2006, Voyager 1 reached the 100 AU mark—in other words, it is 100 times farther from the Sun than Earth,”” says Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist and the former director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “This is an important milestone in our exploration of the Solar System. No other spacecraft has gone so far.”

At 100 AU (astronomical units), Voyager 1 is in a strange realm called “the heliosheath.”

As Stone explains, our entire solar system—planets and all—sits inside a giant bubble of gas called the heliosphere. The sun is responsible; it blows the bubble by means of the solar wind. Voyager 1 has traveled all the way from the bubble's heart to its outer edge, a gassy membrane dividing the solar system from interstellar space. This “membrane” is the heliosheath.

Before Voyager 1 reached its present location, researchers had calculated what the heliosheath might be like. “Many of our predictions were wrong,” says Stone. In situ, Voyager 1 has encountered unexpected magnetic anomalies and a surprising increase in low-energy cosmic rays, among other things. It's all very strange—“and we're not even out of the Solar System yet.”

To report new developments, Voyager radios Earth almost every day. At the speed of light, the messages take 14 hours to arrive. Says Stone, “it's worth the wait.”

Keep up with the Voyager mission at voyager.jpl.nasa.gov. To learn the language of Voyager's messages, kids (of all ages) can check out spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/vgr_fact1.shtml .

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

By Diane K. Fisher

For over 40 years, the “Mars” 70-m Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, California, has vigilantly listened for tiny signals from spacecraft that are billions of miles away. (Click image for larger view.)

In nature, adjacent animals on the food chain tend to evolve together. As coyotes get sneakier, rabbits get bigger ears. Hearing impaired rabbits die young. Clumsy coyotes starve. So each species pushes the other to “improve.”

The technologies pushing robotic space exploration have been like that. Improvements in the supporting communications and data processing infrastructure on the ground (the “ears” of the scientists) have allowed spacecraft to go farther, be smaller and smarter, and send increasingly faint signals back to Earth—and with a fire hose instead of a squirt gun.

Since 1960, improvements in NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) of radio wave antennas have made possible the improvements and advances in the robotic spacecraft they support.

“In 1964, when Mariner IV flew past Mars and took a few photographs, the limitation of the communication link meant that it took eight hours to return to Earth a single photograph from the Red Planet. By 1989, when Voyager observed Neptune, the DSN capability had increased so much that almost real-time video could be received from the much more distant Planet, Neptune,” writes William H. Pickering, Director of JPL from 1954 to 1976, in his Foreword to the book, Uplink-Downlink: A History of the Deep Space Network, 1957-1997, by Douglas J. Mudgway.

Mudgway, an engineer from Australia, was involved in the planning and construction of the first 64-m DSN antenna, which began operating in the Mojave Desert in Goldstone, California, in 1966. This antenna, dubbed “Mars,” was so successful from the start, that identical 64-m antennas were constructed at the other two DSN complexes in Canberra, Australia, and Madrid, Spain.

As Mudgway noted in remarks made during the recent observance of the Mars antenna's 40 years of service, “In no time at all, the flight projects were competing with radio astronomy, radio science, radar astronomy, SETI (Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence), geodynamics, and VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) for time on the antenna … It was like a scientific gold rush.”

by Patrick L. Barry

New GOES-N satellite launches, carrying an imaging radiometer, an atmospheric sounder, and a collection of other space environment monitoring instruments. (Click image for larger view.)

When severe weather occurs, there's a world of difference for people on the ground between a storm that's overhead and one that's several kilometers away. Yet current geostationary weather satellites can be as much as 3 km off in pinpointing the true locations of storms.

A new generation of weather satellites will boost this accuracy by 2 to 4 times. The first in this new installment of NOAA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites series, called GOES-N, was launched May 24 by NASA and Boeing for NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.) (A new polar-orbiting weather satellite, NOAA-18, was launched May 2005.)

Along with better accuracy at pinpointing storms, GOES-N sports a raft of improvements that will enhance our ability to monitor the weather?both normal, atmospheric weather and “space weather.”

“Satellites eventually wear out or get low on fuel, so we've got to launch new weather satellites every few years if we want to keep up the continuous eye on weather that NOAA has maintained for more than 30 years now,” says Thomas Wrublewski, liaison officer for NOAA at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Currently, GOES-N is in a “parking” orbit at 90° west longitude over the equator. For the next 6 months it will remain there while NASA thoroughly tests all its systems. If all goes well, it will someday replace one of the two active GOES satellites?either the eastern satellite (75°W) or the western one (135°W), depending on the condition of those satellites at the time.

Unlike all previous GOES satellites, GOES-N carries star trackers aboard to precisely determine its orientation in space. Also for the first time, the storm-tracking instruments have been mounted to an “optical bench,” which is a very stable platform that resists thermal warping. These two improvements will let scientists say with 2 to 4 times greater accuracy exactly where storms are located.

Also, X-ray images of the Sun taken by GOES-N will be about twice as sharp as before. The new Solar X-ray Imager (SXI) will also automatically identify solar flares as they happen, instead of waiting for a scientist on the ground to analyze the images. Flares affect space weather, triggering geomagnetic storms that can damage communications satellites and even knock out city power grids. The improved imaging and detection of solar flares by GOES-N will allow for earlier warnings.

So for thunderstorms and solar storms alike, GOES-N will be an even sharper eye in the sky.

Find out more about GOES-N at goespoes.gsfc.nasa.gov/goes. Also, for young people, the SciJinks Weather Laboratory at scijinks.nasa.gov now includes a printable booklet titled “How Do You Make a Weather Satellite?” Just click on Technology.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

by Dr. Tony Phillips

The image on the left is the Vela Supernova Remnant as imaged in X-rays by ROSAT. On the right are some of the slew images obtained by XMM-Newton in its “spare” time. (Click image for larger view.)

The Ring Nebula. Check. M13. Check. Next up: The Whirlpool galaxy…

You punch in the coordinates and your telescope takes off, slewing across the sky. You tap your feet and stare at the stars. These Messier marathons would go much faster if the telescope didn't take so long to slew. What a waste of time!

Don't tell that to the x-ray astronomers.

“We're putting our slew time to good use,” explains Norbert Schartel, project scientist for the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton x-ray telescope. The telescope, named for Sir Isaac Newton, was launched into Earth orbit in 1999. It's now midway through an 11-year mission to study black holes, neutron stars, active galaxies and other violent denizens of the Universe that show up particularly well at x-ray wavelengths.

For the past four years, whenever XMM-Newton slewed from one object to another, astronomers kept the telescope's cameras running, recording whatever might drift through the field of view. The result is a stunning survey of the heavens covering 15% of the entire sky.

Sifting through the data, ESA astronomers have found entire clusters of galaxies unknown before anyone started paying attention to “slew time.” Some already-known galaxies have been caught in the act of flaring?a sign, researchers believe, of a central black hole gobbling matter from nearby stars and interstellar clouds. Here in our own galaxy, the 20,000 year old Vela supernova remnant has been expanding. XMM-Newton has slewed across it many times, tracing its changing contours in exquisite detail.

By Patrick L. Barry and Dr. Tony Phillips

Artist's rendering of a four-quadrant solar sail propulsion system, with payload. NASA is designing and developing such concepts, a sub-scale model of which may be tested on a future NMP mission. (Click image for larger view.)

When exploring space, NASA naturally wants to use all the newest and coolest technologies—artificial intelligence, solar sails,šonboard supercomputers, exotic materials.

But “new” also means unproven and risky, and that could be a problem. Remember HAL in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”? The rebellious computer clearly needed some pre-flight testing.

Testing advanced technologies in space is the mission of the New Millennium Program (NMP),šcreated by NASA's Science Mission Directorate in 1995 and run by JPL.š Like the daredevil test pilots of the 1950s whošwould fly the latest jet technology, NMP flies newštechnologies in space to see if they're ready for prime time.š Thatšway, future missions can use the technologies with much less risk.

Example: In 1999, the program's Deep Space 1 probe tested a system called “AutoNav,” short for Autonomous Navigation. AutoNav used artificial intelligence to steer the spacecraft without human intervention. It worked so well that elements of AutoNav were installed on a real mission, Deep Impact, which famously blasted a crater in Comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005. Without AutoNav, the projectile would have completely missed the comet.

Some NMP technologies “allow us to do things that wešliterally could not do before,” says Jack Stocky, Chief Technologist for NMP.š Dozens of innovative technologies tested by NMP willšlead to satellites and space probes that are smaller, lighter, morešcapable and even cheaper than those of today.

Why is the sky blue? Why does the sky sometimes turn red at sunset? Every curious child will ask these question at some point. Are you ready to give scientifically correct and simple answers?

Visit SciJinks to refresh your memory. The SciJinks Web Site targets young people of middle school age. It is a joint effort of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The new "Why is the sky blue?" page can be found in the How & Why menu on the SciJinks Weather Laboratory home page, http://scijinks.jpl.nasa.gov