Huntsville Symphony String Quartet Performs at Marshall

By Jessica Barnett 

NASA Marshall Space Flight Center team members were treated to a special 30-minute performance by musicians from the Huntsville Symphony Orchestra inside Activities Building 4316 on Sept. 21.

The string quartet included two violinists, a violist, and a cellist performing several recognizable classical compositions, including Gershwin’s “Summertime” and Mouret’s “Rondeau.”

The performance was part of “Symphony in the City,” an educational and outreach campaign providing free live performances throughout North Alabama. The string quartet performed earlier that afternoon inside the Java Café for Redstone Arsenal personnel.

The Huntsville Symphony Orchestra originally began performing in 1955 and today serves as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization offering concerts, educational programs and more with leading musicians from around the world. 

Barnett, a Media Fusion employee, supports the Marshall Office of Communications.

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NASA’s Webb Receives IAF Excellence in Industry Award

The International Astronautical Federation (IAF) has awarded its Excellence in Industry Award to NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The award will be presented at the 2023 International Astronautical Congress, taking place in Baku, Azerbaijan, Oct. 2 through Oct. 6, 2023.   

The IAF Excellence in Industry Award is intended to distinguish organizations worldwide for introducing innovative space technologies to the global marketplace.

NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy will accept the award on behalf of NASA. The award recognizes the contributions of the team that designed, developed, and now operates Webb, which also includes ESA (European Space Agency), CSA (Canadian Space Agency), NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and Northrop Grumman.

“The James Webb Space Telescope continues to astound us,” said Melroy. “We are only a little over a year into Webb’s science mission, and already it has solved longstanding mysteries about the early universe and opened up exciting new questions in the search for habitable worlds. These transformative discoveries are only possible thanks to the massive, international team that worked for decades to make Webb a reality. I can’t wait to see where Webb’s mission to explore the secrets of the universe takes us next.”

Launched Dec. 25, 2021, after more than a decade of preparation, Webb successfully performed a complex series of deployments shortly after leaving Earth orbit.

About a month later, the telescope reached its working orbit at the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point, a stable orbit in space well beyond that of the Moon. Once there and fully commissioned, the 21-foot (6.5-meter) telescope began its record-breaking work.

Webb operates at infrared wavelengths. The combination of sensitive instrumentation with its large primary mirror allows the telescope to see farther and more clearly than any previous observatory of its kind. Discoveries from existing and newly identified targets began to accumulate almost immediately. The first images were unveiled on July 12, 2022.     

The ever-growing list of Webb discoveries includes direct imaging of exoplanets and the identification of key molecules in their atmospheres; tracking clouds on Saturn’s moon Titan; identifying new details in a cluster of galaxies; imaging the incredibly faint rings around Uranus; capturing the galactic merger of Arp 220; discovering sand-bearing clouds on a remote exoplanet; measuring the temperature of a rocky exoplanet; detecting the most distant active supermassive black hole to date; and observing galaxies seen in their earliest years, when the universe was just 350 million years old – about two percent of its current age.

Founded in 1951, the International Astronautical Federation is a space advocacy body with members in 75 countries, including all leading space agencies, companies, research institutions, universities, societies, associations, institutes, and museums worldwide. The Federation advances knowledge about space, supporting the development and application of space assets by promoting global cooperation.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s largest, most powerful, and most complex space science telescope ever built. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.

Rob Gutro
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

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NASA Prize Targets Inclusive Community Building for Tech Development

Revolutionary space technology research and development relies on novel ideas across America. To that end, NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) is rolling out an innovative engagement strategy to help enhance outreach efforts, reduce barriers to entry, and attract high-quality proposals from a diverse pool of researchers.

A new NASA Space Tech Catalyst Prize sets out to expand the agency’s network of proposers and foster effective engagement approaches within NASA’s Early-Stage Innovations and Partnerships (ESIP) portfolio. Through this prize, NASA will recognize U.S. individuals and/or organizations that share effective best practices on approaches and methods for how they successfully engage underrepresented and diverse space technology innovators, researchers, technologists, and entrepreneurs.

“Diversity leads to greater innovation in space technology, better research, deeper discoveries, and achievements in human spaceflight,” said Shahra Lambert, senior advisor for engagement and equity at NASA. “We won’t discover new possibilities alone – it will take the best of all of us to get us there. When we enable more people to participate, we provide space for all possible talent, perspectives, and innovations. This empowers NASA to achieve the greatest success in discovering and expanding knowledge for the benefit of all humanity.”

Numerous individuals and/or teams will each be awarded $25,000, and the cohort of winners will be invited to an in-person event at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. During the event, NASA aims to learn industry best practices for engaging and building a diverse community of space technology research and development professionals to inform future NASA plans and grow partnership potential.

Applicants may include teachers, mentors, and other individuals. Universities, non-profits, businesses, and other organizations are also encouraged to apply. Interested and eligible individuals and organizations should register and fill out the submission form on the competition website, provide references, and submit a short video. Applicants will be asked to describe the groups they currently engage with, what barriers their engagement approaches have addressed, an explanation of how NASA investment will further their work, and more.

“We want to create a network of NASA space technology champions that bring our funding opportunities to their communities and new ideas to NASA,” said Jenn Gustetic, the Early-Stage Innovation and Partnerships director in NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate.  “The agency can learn a lot from individuals and organizations already doing successful outreach to and engagement with underrepresented groups to inform our future engagement and capacity building efforts to researchers and businesses that haven’t worked with NASA ESIP.”

Interested applicants should register online by Feb. 8, 2024. Applications must be completed and submitted by Feb. 22, 2024.

For more information about the NASA Space Tech Catalyst Prize and details on eligibility criteria and how to participate, visit:

www.spacetechcatalystprize.org

The Space Technology Mission Directorate and ESIP annually invests in more than 700 early-stage projects and activities through six programs.

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Living on the Edge: Supernova Bubble Expands in New Hubble Time-Lapse Movie

Though a doomed star exploded some 20,000 years ago, its tattered remnants continue racing into space at breakneck speeds – and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has caught the action.

The nebula, called the Cygnus Loop, forms a bubble-like shape that is about 120 light-years in diameter. The distance to its center is approximately 2,600 light-years. The entire nebula has a width of six full Moons as seen on the sky.

Astronomers used Hubble to zoom into a very small slice of the leading edge of this expanding supernova bubble, where the supernova blast wave plows into surrounding material in space. Hubble images taken from 2001 to 2020 clearly demonstrate how the remnant’s shock front has expanded over time, and they used the crisp images to clock its speed.

By analyzing the shock’s location, astronomers found that the shock hasn’t slowed down at all in the last 20 years, and is speeding into interstellar space at over half a million miles per hour – fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in less than half an hour. While this seems incredibly fast, it’s actually on the slow end for the speed of a supernova shock wave. Researchers were able to assemble a “movie” from Hubble images for a close-up look at how the tattered star is slamming into interstellar space.

“Hubble is the only way that we can actually watch what’s happening at the edge of the bubble with such clarity,” said Ravi Sankrit, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. “The Hubble images are spectacular when you look at them in detail. They’re telling us about the density differences encountered by the supernova shocks as they propagate through space, and the turbulence in the regions behind these shocks.”

A very close-up look at a nearly two-light-year-long section of the filaments of glowing hydrogen and ionized oxygen shows that they look like a wrinkled sheet seen from the side. “You’re seeing ripples in the sheet that is being seen edge-on, so it looks like twisted ribbons of light,” said William Blair of the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland. “Those wiggles arise as the shock wave encounters more or less dense material in the interstellar medium.” The time-lapse movie over nearly two decades shows the filaments moving against the background stars but keeping their shape.

“When we pointed Hubble at the Cygnus Loop we knew that this was the leading edge of a shock front, which we wanted to study. When we got the initial picture and saw this incredible, delicate ribbon of light, well, that was a bonus. We didn’t know it was going to resolve that kind of structure,” said Blair.

Blair explained that the shock is moving outward from the explosion site and then it starts to encounter the interstellar medium, the tenuous regions of gas and dust in interstellar space. This is a very transitory phase in the expansion of the supernova bubble where invisible neutral hydrogen is heated to one million degrees Fahrenheit or more by the shock wave’s passage. The gas then begins to glow as electrons are excited to higher energy states and emit photons as they cascade back to low energy states. Further behind the shock front, ionized oxygen atoms begin to cool, emitting a characteristic glow shown in blue.

The Cygnus Loop was discovered in 1784 by William Herschel, using a simple 18-inch reflecting telescope. He could have never imagined that a little over two centuries later we’d have a telescope powerful enough to zoom in on a very tiny slice of the nebula for this spectacular view.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, in Washington, D.C.

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Hubble Views a Glistening Red Nebula

Just in time for the fall foliage season, this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features a glistening scene in red. It reveals a small region of the nebula Westerhout 5, which lies about 7,000 light-years from Earth. Suffused with bright red light, this luminous image hosts a variety of interesting features, including a free-floating Evaporating Gaseous Globule (frEGG). The frEGG in this image is the small tadpole-shaped dark region in the upper center-left. This buoyant-looking bubble is lumbered with two names – [KAG2008] globule 13 and J025838.6+604259.

FrEGGs are a particular class of Evaporating Gaseous Globules (EGGs). Both frEGGs and EGGs are denser regions of gas that photoevaporate less easily than the less dense gas surrounding them. Photoevaporation occurs when gas is ionized and dispersed away by an intense source of radiation – typically young, hot stars releasing vast amounts of ultraviolet (UV) light. EGGs were identified fairly recently, most notably at the tips of the iconic Pillars of Creation captured by Hubble in 1995. FrEGGs were classified even more recently and are distinguished from EGGs because they are detached and have a distinct ‘head-tail’ shape. FrEGGs and EGGs are of particular interest because their density makes it more difficult for intense UV radiation, found in regions rich in young stars, to penetrate them. Their relative opacity means that the gas within them is protected from ionization and photoevaporation. Astronomers think this is important for the formation of protostars, and that many FrEGGs and EGGs play host to the birth of new stars.

FrEGGs are a particular class of Evaporating Gaseous Globules (EGGs). Both frEGGs and EGGs are denser regions of gas that photoevaporate less easily than the less dense gas surrounding them. Photoevaporation occurs when gas is ionized and dispersed away by an intense source of radiation – typically young, hot stars releasing vast amounts of ultraviolet (UV) light. EGGs were identified fairly recently, most notably at the tips of the iconic Pillars of Creation captured by Hubble in 1995. FrEGGs were classified even more recently and are distinguished from EGGs because they are detached and have a distinct ‘head-tail’ shape. FrEGGs and EGGs are of particular interest because their density makes it more difficult for intense UV radiation, found in regions rich in young stars, to penetrate them. Their relative opacity means that the gas within them is protected from ionization and photoevaporation. Astronomers think this is important for the formation of protostars, and that many FrEGGs and EGGs play host to the birth of new stars.
The frEGG in this image is a dark spot in the sea of red light. The red color is a type of light emission known as H-alpha emission. H-alpha occurs when a very energetic electron within a hydrogen atom loses a set amount of its energy, releasing this distinctive red light as it becomes less energetic.

Text credit: European Space Agency (ESA)

Media Contact:

Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov

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