NuSTAR Principal Investigator Honored for Research

NASA - NuStar Mission logo.

August 9, 2016

Fiona Harrison, principal investigator of NASA's NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) mission, has been selected to receive the 2016 Massey Award, given by the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR).

The Massey Award honors "outstanding contributions to the development of space research in which a leadership role is of particular importance" and honors the memory of Sir Harrie Massey.

Image above: Fiona Harrison is the principal investigator of NASA's NuSTAR mission, based at Caltech. Image Credit: Caltech.

"It has been great to work with such a strong and talented team on NuSTAR," said Harrison, a professor of astronomy at Caltech. "The whole team deserves credit in NuSTAR's success."

NuSTAR launched in June 2012, opening a new window to the universe as the first focusing telescope to operate in a high-frequency band of X-rays called hard X-rays.

Among NuSTAR's accomplishments so far, the observatory created the first map of radioactive material in a supernova remnant. The remnant, called Cassiopeia A, is the blown out pieces of an exploded star, which produced traces of the radioactive isotope titanium-44. NuSTAR also detected this substance in the remnant of supernova 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Such research shows how shock waves likely rip apart large dying stars.

Image above: This artist's concept shows NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) spacecraft on orbit. Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

The NuSTAR team also discovered emission from a special type of neutron star called a magnetar, which has an extremely strong magnetic field. This object was the first pulsar -- a dead stellar remnant that emits beams of radiation as it spins -- discovered near the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

Additionally, astronomers used NuSTAR data to find the brightest pulsar ever recorded. This astonishing object has helped astronomers refine their theories about sources of blinding X-rays called ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs). Most scientists believed that these sources were black holes more than 1,000 times the mass of our sun. But NuSTAR found that one such source, the extremely bright Messier 82, is actually a pulsar, not a black hole.

Image above: NuSTAR helped make the first map of radioactivity in a supernova remnant -- the blown-out bits and pieces of a massive star that exploded. Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/CXC/SAO.

"These and many other discoveries make Fiona Harrison one of the most active leaders of modern high energy astrophysics," the award citation notes.

Harrison has been the principal investigator since the mission was founded in 2005. After earning a doctoral degree in physics at the University of California, Berkeley, she first came to Caltech in 1993 as a research fellow. She began her professorial career at Caltech in 1995, and is currently the Benjamin M. Rosen Professor of Physics and Kent and Joyce Kresa Leadership Chair of the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy there.

The mission will continue to allow astronomers to explore such topics as the evolution of massive black holes, the deaths of stars and the creation of heavy elements in supernova explosions.

Related link:

The first map of radioactive material in a supernova remnant: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4052

Related article:

The brightest pulsar ever recorded:

NASA’s NuSTAR Telescope Discovers Shockingly Bright Dead Star
http://orbiterchspacenews.blogspot.ch/2014/10/nasas-nustar-telescope-discovers.html

For more information on NuSTAR, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/nustar

http://nustar.caltech.edu

Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/JPL/Elizabeth Landau.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Rosetta celebrates two incredible years at the comet

ESA - Rosetta Mission patch.

August 8, 2016

Two incredible years have passed since ESA’s comet-chaser Rosetta arrived at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on 6 August 2014.

During that time Rosetta has mapped the comet’s curious shape and given us awe-inspiring views from near and far, spotting changes in its surface features and watching as jets of gas and dust stream out in to space – sometimes unexpectedly as sudden outbursts.

Image above: Comet on 6 August 2016 – NavCam. Image Credits: ESA/Rosetta/NavCam – CC BY-SA IGO 3.0.

The spacecraft has performed daring close flybys and made distant excursions to sample gas, dust and plasma at a range of distances, giving unparalleled insight into the processes that operate at the comet and how it interacts with its environment as it hurtles through space.

In two years, the comet has travelled around 1.5 billion km along its orbit around the Sun, passing through perihelion last August – its closest approach to the Sun – and putting on a spectacular fireworks display as its activity reached a maximum.

Unlike this time last year, when the comet was so active that Rosetta could only observe it from a safe distance of 200–300 km, the activity has since subsided and the spacecraft is now operating at much closer distances, as reflected in this image, captured on 6 August 2016 from 8.5 km. The scale is 0.7 m/pixel and the image measures about 700 m across.

It shows a close-up view of part of the comet’s small lobe, encapsulating some of the large depression known as Hatmehit and its steep cliff walls (left), and the contrasting heavily fractured terrain of Wosret (bottom) and Bastet (top). A portion of the horizon is also captured in the distance, at the top right.

Image above: Full-frame NAVCAM image taken on 5 August 2014 from a distance of about 145 km from comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Image Credits: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM.

Local variations in topography and individual large boulders cast impressive shadows across the scene. For example, the details of the cliff edge at the top left are recorded in the shadows it casts on the floor below.

The area close to the bottom of the image has been the focus of imaging campaigns attempting to find Rosetta’s lander Philae, where it is thought to have bounced in November 2014, but has yet to be confirmed.

With Rosetta still flying alongside, the comet is now heading back towards the outer Solar System. As such, power is falling, and Rosetta’s thrilling mission will soon conclude in a grand finale: it will make a controlled impact onto the surface of the comet on 30 September.

Related article:

Rosetta finale set for 30 September
http://orbiterchspacenews.blogspot.ch/2016/06/rosetta-finale-set-for-30-september.html

Related links:

Comet viewer tool: http://sci.esa.int/comet-viewer/

Where is Rosetta?: http://sci.esa.int/where_is_rosetta/

For more information about Rosetta mission, visit: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta

Rosetta overview: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta_overview

Rosetta in depth: http://sci.esa.int/rosetta

Image (mentioned), Text, Credit: European Space Agency (ESA).

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

Long Divisions

NASA - Cassini International logo.

Aug. 8, 2016

The shadow of Saturn on the rings, which stretched across all of the rings earlier in Cassini's mission (see PIA08362), now barely makes it past the Cassini division.

The changing length of the shadow marks the passing of the seasons on Saturn. As the planet nears its northern-hemisphere solstice in May 2017, the shadow will get even shorter. At solstice, the shadow's edge will be about 28,000 miles (45,000 kilometers) from the planet's surface, barely making it past the middle of the B ring.

The moon Mimas is a few pixels wide, near the lower left in this image.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 35 degrees above the ring plane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on May 21, 2016.

The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 2.0 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) from Saturn. Image scale is 120 miles (190 kilometers) per pixel.

The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org and ESA's website: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Cassini-Huygens

Related link:

PIA08362: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA08362

Image, Text, Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Tony Greicius.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

NASA Sees Tropical Storm Earl Over Mexico

NASA - NOAA Suomi NPP satellite logo.

Aug. 6, 2016

Earl (Caribbean Sea)

Tropical Storm Earl made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane in Belize on Aug. 4, and NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite saw the storm move over Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula the next day.

Image above: This true color image from NASA-NOAA Suomi NPP satellite on Aug. 4 at 3:30 p.m. EDT (19:30 UTC) shows Tropical Storm Earl over Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. Image Credits: NOAA/NASA.

On Aug. 4 at 3:30 p.m. EDT (19:30 UTC) the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument aboard NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite captured a visible-light image of Earl over the Yucatan. The VIIRS image showed that Earl still had thunderstorms around its center of circulation, but bands of thunderstorms around the center were fragmented.

On Aug. 5 a tropical storm warning is in effect for Ciudad del Carmen westward to Laguna Verde, Mexico, as Earl was hugging the coast of the Bay of Campeche.

At 8 a.m. EDT (1200 UTC) the center of Tropical Storm Earl was estimated near 18.5 north latitude and 93.5 west longitude. That put Earl's center just 65 miles (105 km) east-northeast of Coatzacoalcos, Mexico.

Suomi NPP satellite. Image Credits: NASA/NOAA

Earl is moving toward the west-northwest at near 12 mph (19 kph). The National Hurricane Center forecasts a turn toward the west and a decrease in forward speed later today (Aug. 5). On the forecast track, the center of Earl will be moving near the coast along the extreme southern Bay of Campeche today and tonight. Earl will then move into southeastern mainland Mexico on Saturday, Aug. 6.

Maximum sustained winds remain near 40 mph (65 kph) with higher gusts. Little change in strength is likely today or tonight, with weakening expected on Saturday when Earl moves into mainland Mexico.

For updated forecasts from NHC, visit: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov

For more information about NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/NPP/main/

Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, by Rob Gutro.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

CERN - Chicago sees floods of LHC data and new results at ICHEP

CERN - European Organization for Nuclear Research logo.

August 5, 2016

Image above: One of the many meetings at CERN where physicists prepared to showcase results at ICHEP. (Image: Maximilien Brice/ CERN).

Particle physicists are showcasing a wealth of brand new results from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments at CERN [1] at the “ICHEP 2016” [2] conference in Chicago. With a flood of new data, the experiment collaborations can now dive in and explore at the new energy frontier of 13 TeV, following last year’s first glimpse of physics at this unprecedented energy level. LHC collaborations are presenting more than 100 different new results, including many analyses based on newly taken 2016 data.

Thanks to the outstanding performances of the LHC, experiments have already recorded about 5 times more data in 2016 than in 2015, in just a few months of operations. The LHC surpassed its design luminosity in June – a parameter measuring the number of collisions per second. The peak luminosity reaches about 1 billion collisions per second so that even the rarest processes at the highest effective energy could occur. The LHC is thus running beyond expectations and the objective of 25 inverse femtobarn [3] of proton–proton collisions delivered to experiments for the whole of 2016 is within sight. The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid has stretched well beyond previous records, with more than 25 PB of data stored and processed since the beginning of the year.

“The LHC really entered a new regime by reaching its nominal luminosity, now exceeded by 20%,” said CERN Director for Accelerators and Technology, Frédérick Bordry. “It’s a major achievement and we can be confident that we will go beyond our goals for the full second run of the LHC.”

Images above: Event selected in the search for a CP-odd Higgs boson decaying to Zh (ATLAS-CONF-2016-015). The resolved jets are represented by red and yellow cones. The Z boson is reconstructed as Z → e+e-, and the electron tracks are shown as green lines. The di-jet system has an invariant mass of 128 GeV, and the measured mZh in this event is 268 GeV. (Image: ATLAS Collaboration/CERN).

Physicists have been hard at work in the past months dealing with the huge amount of data recorded by the LHC experiments. With a larger data set now analysed, more precise measurements of the Standard Model processes and more sensitive searches for the direct production of new particles at the highest energy are possible. As an example, the 125 GeV Higgs boson, discovered in 2012, has now also been observed at the new energy of 13 TeV with higher statistical significance. In addition, both ATLAS and CMS experiments have made new precise measurements of Standard Model processes, especially looking for anomalous particle interactions at high mass, a very sensitive but indirect test for physics beyond the Standard Model.

“This is one of the most exciting times in recent years for physicists, as we dig into the unknown in earnest: the particle physics at an energy never explored before,” said CERN Director for Research and Computing, Eckhard Elsen.

ATLAS and CMS have also looked for any signs of the direct production of new particles predicted by Supersymmetry and other exotic theories of physics beyond the Standard Model, but no compelling evidence of new physics has appeared yet. In particular, the intriguing hint of a possible resonance at 750 GeV decaying into photon pairs, which caused considerable interest from the 2015 data, has not reappeared in the much larger 2016 data set and thus appears to be a statistical fluctuation.

Image above: This image shows a collision event with the largest-mass jet pair fulfilling all analysis requirements observed so far by the CMS detector in proton-proton collision data collected in 2016. The mass of the di-jet system is 7.7 TeV. Both jets are reconstructed in the barrel region and each have transverse momenta of over 3 TeV. (Image: Thomas Mc Cauley/CERN).

LHCb are presenting many interesting new results as well, in the domain of flavour physics. A particular highlight is the discovery of the decay mode B⁰->K⁺K^-, the rarest B-meson decay into a hadronic final state ever observed, as well as studies of unprecedented sensitivity of CP violation, a very subtle phenomenon explaining nature’s “preference” for matter over antimatter. LHCb have also conducted measurements that could help to reveal some new phenomena such as the first measurement of the photon polarisation in radiative decays of Bs mesons and determinations of the production cross-sections of several key processes at a collision energy of 13 TeV – some of which, at first sight, are at variance with current predictions.

All four experiments are presenting results from heavy ion collisions at the LHC. Amongst these, The ALICE Collaboration are presenting new measurements of the properties of quark-gluon plasma – a state of matter that existed a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang. ALICE physicists are studying how the nuclear forces are modified in this primordial state of matter. Researchers also measured the viscosity of the plasma at the new energy, showing that it flows almost like an ideal liquid, the same behaviour this is observed at lower collision energies.

“We're just at the beginning of the journey,” said CERN Director-General, Fabiola Gianotti. “The superb performance of the LHC accelerator, experiments and computing bode extremely well for a detailed and comprehensive exploration of the several TeV energy scale, and significant progress in our understanding of fundamental physics.”

ICHEP 2016 - Interview: Fabiola Gianotti, CERN Director-General

Video above: CERN Director-General, Fabiola Gianotti, shares her thoughts on the LHC physics results presented at ICHEP 2016. (Video: Jacques Herve Fichet, Photography: Maximilien Brice/CERN).

ICHEP 2016 - Interview: Gian Giudice, CERN Head of Theory

Video above: CERN Head of Theory Department, Gian Giudice, shares his thoughts on the LHC physics results presented at ICHEP 2016. (Video: BBC Horizon / Edited by CERN).

Updates from the experiments:

ALICE: http://aliceinfo.cern.ch/Public/Welcome.html

ATLAS: https://atlas.cern/tags/ichep2016

CMS: http://cms-results.web.cern.ch/cms-results/public-results/preliminary-results/ICHEP-2016.html

LHCb: http://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch/lhcb-public/Welcome.html

Notes:

[1] CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. Its headquarters are in Geneva. Its Member States are: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom. Cyprus and Serbia are Associate Member States in the pre-stage to Membership. Pakistan and Turkey are Associate Member States. The European Union, India, Japan, JINR, the Russian Federation, UNESCO and the United States of America have Observer status.

[2] The 38^th International Conference on High Energy Physics, 3–10 August in Chicago, USA http://www.ichep2016.org/ .

[3] One inverse femtobarn at the LHC corresponds to approximately 100 trillion (100x10¹²) proton–proton collisions.

Related links:

Large Hadron Collider (LHC): http://home.cern/topics/large-hadron-collider

Worldwide LHC Computing Grid: http://home.cern/about/computing/worldwide-lhc-computing-grid

Standard Model: http://home.cern/tags/standard-model

Higgs boson: http://home.cern/topics/higgs-boson

Supersymmetry: http://home.cern/about/physics/supersymmetry

Big Bang: http://home.cern/tags/big-bang

For more information about the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), visit: http://home.web.cern.ch/

Images (mentioned), Videos (mentioned), Text, Credits: CERN/Kathryn Coldham.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

IRIS Spots Plasma Rain on Sun's Surface

NASA - Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) logo.

Aug. 5, 2016

IRIS Spots Plasma Rain on Sun's Surface

Image Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center; Joy Ng, producer/IRIS/Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory.

On July 24, 2016, NASA’s Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, captured a mid-level solar flare: a sudden flash of bright light on the solar limb – the horizon of the sun – as seen at the beginning of this video. Solar flares are powerful explosions of radiation. During flares, a large amount of magnetic energy is released, heating the sun’s atmosphere and releasing energized particles out into space. Observing flares such as this helps the IRIS mission study how solar material and energy move throughout the sun’s lower atmosphere, so we can better understand what drives the constant changes we can see on our sun.

IRIS Spots Plasma Rain on Sun's Surface

Video Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center; Joy Ng, producer/IRIS/Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory.

As the video continues, solar material cascades down to the solar surface in great loops, a flare-driven event called post-flare loops or coronal rain. This material is plasma, a gas in which positively and negatively charged particles have separated, forming a superhot mix that follows paths guided by complex magnetic forces in the sun's atmosphere. As the plasma falls down, it rapidly cools – from millions down to a few tens of thousands of kelvins. The corona is much hotter than the sun’s surface; the details of how this happens is a mystery that scientists continue to puzzle out. Bright pixels that appear at the end of the video aren’t caused by the solar flare, but occur when high-energy particles bombard IRIS’s charge-coupled device camera – an instrument used to detect photons.

Related Links:

IRIS mission overview: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/iris/overview/index.html

IRIS (Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph): http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/iris/index.html

Image (mentioned), Video (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, by Lina Tran/Rob Garner.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Decades of Discovery: NASA’s Exploration of Jupiter

NASA - JUNO Mission logo.

Aug. 5, 2016

Image above: This illustration depicts NASA's Juno spacecraft in orbit above Jupiter. From its unique polar orbit, Juno will repeatedly dive between the planet and its intense belts of charged particle radiation, coming only about 3,000 miles (5,000 kilometers) from the cloud tops at closest approach. Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Launched five years ago on Aug. 5, 2011, NASA’s Juno mission maneuvered into orbit around Jupiter on July 4, 2016, joining a long tradition of discovery at the gas giant.

One of the brightest objects in the night sky, Jupiter has enthralled humans since ancient times. Today, scientists believe that learning more about the planet may be the key to discovering our solar system’s origins and formation. They theorize that Jupiter didn’t always rest where it is now, but that it moved throughout the solar system in its youth, disrupting the formation of Mars, influencing the formation and location of the asteroid belt, and more.

Scientists began to use space missions to unlock the planet’s secrets in the early 1970s when Juno’s earliest ancestors, Pioneer 10 and 11, launched. The pair of spacecraft reached the planet in late 1973 and early 1974. For the first time ever, scientists could obtain direct observations and close-up images of Jupiter, its moons and the mysterious Great Red Spot.

Image above: An artist's concept of the Pioneer 10 spacecraft. Image Credit: NASA.

From Pioneer’s findings, scientists were able to make numerous conclusions about Jupiter. They found that the planet is composed mostly of liquid, and that it has a magnetotail, an extension of its magnetic field, like Earth. This hinted at Jupiter’s composition and the possibility of a solid core. They also got a close look at Jupiter’s clouds – from 26,000 miles (about 42,000 km) – to determine weather patterns.

The Pioneer missions paved the way for a second set of Jupiter-focused missions in the late 1970s, Voyager 1 and 2. Launched in 1977, the spacecraft are most famous for traversing to the outermost portion of the solar system – Voyager 1 has even passed its outer limits and has now passed into the space between solar systems. In time, Voyager 2 and the Pioneer missions will also leave the solar system. The Voyager pair flew past Jupiter in 1979, taking more than 52,000 photos of the planet and its moons over the course of several months.

These images and accompanying observations sparked seemingly countless new discoveries. The data revealed many features of the weather on Jupiter, including the existence of lightning in the cloud tops and of hurricane-like storm systems. Plus, for the first time, scientists discovered the existence of active volcanoes elsewhere than Earth, on the planet’s moon Io.

Image above: Voyager 1 took this photo of Jupiter and two of its satellites (Io, left, and Europa) on Feb. 13, 1979. This photo was assembled from three black and white negatives by the Image Processing Lab at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Image Credits: NASA/JPL.

The Galileo missions to Jupiter followed in the late 1980s. Unlike previous missions, this set of spacecraft – an atmospheric probe and an orbiter – were designed to orbit the planet rather than collect data on flyby. The probe was the first spacecraft to directly measure characteristics of Jupiter’s atmosphere – descending 95 miles (153 kilometers) into it before melting and vaporizing from the extreme heat. The probe passed 58 minutes of atmospheric data to the orbiter, which then transmitted it back to Earth. The data included measurements of Jupiter’s atmospheric elements and showed that their abundance differed from that of the sun, providing insight into the planet’s formation.

The orbiter itself made numerous long-term observations about the Jupiter system, including finding evidence to support the theory that an ocean of water lies under the surface of the moon Europa and finding Jupiter’s ring system, a nearly invisible set of rings composed of dust created by meteoroid impacts with the planet’s four moons. In July 1994, Galileo also witnessed the collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter, the first observation of such an impact as it occurred on any planet besides Earth.

The Ulysses mission to study the sun collected data on Jupiter’s magnetosphere while the planet provided a gravitational assist to change the spacecraft’s trajectory in 1992. The Cassini spacecraft also observed Jupiter in 2000 on its way to its target destination, Saturn. Cassini’s camera took 26,000 images of the planet and its moons and created the most detailed global color portrait of Jupiter ever produced at the time.

Image above: This is a composite photo, assembled from separate images of Jupiter and comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, as imaged by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope in 1994. Image Credits: NASA, ESA, H. Weaver and E. Smith (STScI) and J. Trauger and R. Evans (NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory).

More recently, New Horizons, a mission to Pluto, added to these observations during its flyby of Jupiter in 2007, finding the planet changed since previous looks by NASA – the Galileo spacecraft burned up in Jupiter’s atmosphere in fall 2003. New Horizons spent about six months observing the Jupiter planet system during its flyby on the way to Pluto, further exploring its weather systems, moons and rings. Perhaps most notably, New Horizons saw about 36 volcanoes on Io and measured the temperature of lava, finding it similar to that of Earth-based volcanoes.

The Hubble Space Telescope has made multiple observations and taken numerous photos of Jupiter since its launch in April 1990. Hubble’s observations of the planet stretch over 26 years, and many of its observations are concurrent with other Jupiter missions, particularly Galileo. In fact, Hubble also witnessed the collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter, providing another perspective of the impact sites. Hubble’s observations of the gas giant have continued to the present day. In October 2015, Hubble photos showed changes in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, and in June 2016, Hubble took awe-inspiring photos of auroras on the planet’s poles. Hubble’s observations of the solar system and the wider universe are expected to continue through 2020 and beyond.

With Juno’s successful orbit insertion at Jupiter in July 2016, scientists expect to release information about the mission’s first findings in September. NASA has already released several images taken of the planet by the JunoCam camera. Juno will make observations about Jupiter’s atmosphere and magnetic and gravitational fields, providing more information about the planet’s structure so scientists can deepen their understanding of Jupiter’s origin and evolution. Any of these clues could begin to unravel the mystery of the solar system’s origins and formation.

Related information:

    http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/main/index.html
    http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/missions/archive/pioneer10-11.html
    http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/index.html
    https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/galileo/index.cfm
    http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Mission/The-Path-to-Pluto/Jupiter-Encounter.php
    https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/main/index.html
    http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html
    https://www.nasa.gov/pioneer/
    https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/index.html

Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, by Ashley Morrow.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch