In partnership with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the Science, Technology, and Business Division 2020 lecture series will delve into topics such as Greenland meltwater, space telescopes, tracking wildfire smoke, Earth's electrical fields, and icy ocean worlds in our solar system.
NASA's Dr. Rowland will talk about atmospheric escape, his adventures in Norway, and what is being learned from the VISIONS-2 data in his lecture, Exploring Our Escaping Atmosphere: Going above the Top of the World to Watch the Sky, on Thursday, October 17, from 11:30 a.m.-12::30 p.m. in the Madison building's third floor Pickford Theater.
Pluto has become one of our most favorite bodies in the solar system, perhaps gaining increased appreciation after it was demoted from a full-sized planet to dwarf planet in 2006 and thus decreasing our solar system planet count to eight planets. A significant portion of Pluto’s mass is icy material and so it is often referred …
In late 2007 the Dawn mission spacecraft launched and began the 1.8 billion mile journey to the giant asteroid Vesta, which it reached in 2011. It was the first spacecraft to orbit a main-belt asteroid. In March 2015 it completed another 990 million miles to the dwarf planet Ceres and was the first spacecraft to …
The first exoplanets, or extrasolar planets, were definitively discovered in the 1990s, although the idea of other worlds like ours goes back to the ancient Greeks, and their existence had been theorized by Giordano Bruno in the 16th century and Isaac Newton in the 18th. The first direct images of exoplanets were produced in 2008. …
Did you know that there are frozen volcanoes that spew icy particles and water vapor, instead of fiery molten rock? You’ll have to travel millions or billions of miles into the outer solar system to find icy volcanism, also known as cryovolcanism. Many of NASA’s missions to the far-reaches of our solar system have provided evidence …
Today’s post is from Carlyn Osborn, a Library Technician in the Geography and Map Division. Carlyn has a B.A. in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology from Johns Hopkins University and is currently a graduate student at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies. With high-resolution images of Pluto and the search for …
The universe is full of plasma and magnetic fields actively swirling, spiraling, and colliding. These mighty magnetic mysteries can cause gigantic explosions of energy such as solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and geomagnetic storms which often enhance the Earth’s auroras. Space weather is influenced by these highly charged events which can then cause havoc with …
Several types of evidence from past Mars missions lead us to believe that Mars used to be much different from the dry, cold place we find today. Ancient gullies and canyons look as if they were carved by flowing water, minerals that can only be made in standing water have been found, and ancient volcanoes …