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Ahead of the upcoming Ariane 5 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over Kourou – home to Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, an overseas department of France.
Located around 60 km northwest of the French Guianese capital Cayenne, Kourou is a coastal town in the north-central part of the country and is visible in the lower right of the image. The town lies at the estuary of the Kourou River which, after its journey of 144 km, empties into the Atlantic Ocean. Its muddy waters appear brown most likely due to sediments picked up from the surrounding forest.
Long, white sandy beaches line the town’s ocean coast, while the riverbank and inland area consists mostly of mangrove and dense tropical rainforest. The surrounding area’s economy is largely agricultural, with coffee, cacao and tropical fruits being grown.
Just northwest of Kourou lies Europe’s Spaceport – chosen as a base from which to launch satellites in 1964 by the French Government, and currently home to ESA-developed rocket families Ariane and Vega.
As Kourou lies just 500 km north of the equator, it makes it ideally placed for launches into orbit as the rockets gain extra performance thanks to a ‘slingshot effect’ from the speed of Earth’s rotation. In addition, there is no risk of cyclones or earthquakes. This launch base and the jungle that surrounds it covers 690 sq km and protects an abundance of wildlife and plants.
From here, the largest and most powerful telescope ever launched into space – the James Webb Space Telescope – is scheduled for launch. After liftoff, it will embark on a month-long journey to its destination, around one and a half million kilometres from Earth.
Following the footsteps of the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb is designed to answer questions about the Universe and to make breakthrough discoveries in all fields of astronomy. The telescope will be able to detect infrared light generated by galaxies as they formed more than 13.5 billion years ago, in the aftermath of the Big Bang. Webb will see farther into our origins – from the Universe's first galaxies, to the birth of stars and planets, to exoplanets.
In the first month after launch, Webb will unfold its sunshield, which is around the size of a tennis court, and deploy its 6.5-metre primary mirror. This will be used to detect the faint light of distant stars and galaxies with a sensitivity of a hundred times greater than that of Hubble.
Webb is a joint project between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). Find out more about Webb in ESA’s launch kit and interactive brochure.
This image is also featured on the Earth from Space video programme.
Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2020), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
The light that the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope collected to create this Picture of the Week reached the telescope after a journey of 250 million years. Its source was the spiral galaxy UGC 11397, which resides in the constellation Lyra (The Lyre). At first glance, UGC 11397 appears to be an average spiral galaxy: it sports two graceful spiral arms that are illuminated by stars and defined by dark, clumpy clouds of dust.
What sets UGC 11397 apart from a typical spiral lies at its centre, where a supermassive black hole containing 174 million times the mass of the Sun is growing. As a black hole ensnares gas, dust, and even entire stars from its vicinity, this doomed matter heats up and puts on a fantastic cosmic light show. Material trapped by the black hole emits light from gamma rays to radio waves and can brighten and fade without warning. But in some galaxies, including UGC 11397, thick clouds of dust hide much of this energetic activity from view in optical light. Despite this, UGC 11397's actively growing black hole was revealed through its bright X-ray emission — high-energy light that can pierce the surrounding dust. This led astronomers to classify it as a Type 2 Seyfert galaxy, a category used for active galaxies whose central regions are hidden from view in visible light by a doughnut-shaped cloud of dust and gas.
Using Hubble, researchers will study hundreds of galaxies that, like UGC 11397, harbour a supermassive black hole that is gaining mass. The Hubble observations will help researchers weigh nearby supermassive black holes, understand how black holes grew early in the Universe’s history, and even study how stars form in the extreme environment found at the very centre of a galaxy.
[Image Description: A spiral galaxy, seen at an angle that gives it an oval shape. It has two spiral arms that curl out from the centre. They start narrow but broaden out as they wrap around the galaxy before merging into a faint halo. The galaxy’s disc is golden in the centre with a bright core, and pale blue outside that. A swirl of dark dust strands and speckled blue star-forming regions follow the arms through the disc.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. J. Koss, A. J. Barth; CC BY 4.0
no es cualquier ventana. No. Es una de las ventanas de la casa del campo de mis padres y que antes fue de mi abuelo. Lugar en el que jugué y de la que tengo lindos recuerdos. Casa que ya no me resultaba tan querida y entrañable en mi adolescencia cuando pasarme un finde en el campo no era el mejor programa, aunque a veces si me llevaba amigas con quienes compartir podia ser el mejor plan. Luego, ya con hijos el campo volvió a ser el mejor lugar en el que compartimos infinidad de aventuras. Y ahora con hijos adolescentes tengo la suerte de que como vamos poco y siempre invitan amigos para ellos es un buen programa.
VER MÁS: bit.ly/NK6kDt
Ya no era el mismo. Juan Camilo había cambiado mucho desde que nacieron las gemelas. Lo notaba preocupado, con una tensión que no había mostrado ni en su época más complicada y llena de peligros en Cali.
ESCRITO POR
Jesús Méndez
ILUSTRACIÓN:
Tatiana Córdoba
We've discovered a space invasion overnight at ESA HQ in Paris #spaceinvader #space2ISS
Credit: ESA-S. Corvaja
ESA Kiruna station Credit: ESA - CC BY-SA IGO 3.0
ESA's Kiruna station, near Salmijärvi, Kiruna, Sweden, tracks Cryosat, Integral, the Sentinels and Swarm. Details: www.esa.int/kiruna Credit: ESA - CC BY-SA IGO 3.0
The subject of this image taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is the spiral galaxy IC 4633, located 100 million light-years away from us in the constellation Apus. IC 4633 is a galaxy rich in star-forming activity and also hosts an active galactic nucleus at its core. From our point of view, the galaxy is tilted mostly towards us, giving astronomers a fairly good view of its billions of stars.
However, we can’t fully appreciate the features of this galaxy — at least in visible light — because it’s partially concealed by a stretch of dark dust (lower-right third of the image). This dark nebula is part of the Chamaeleon star-forming region, itself located only around 500 light-years from us, in a nearby part of our Milky Way galaxy. The dark clouds in the Chamaeleon region occupy a large area of the southern sky, covering their namesake constellation but also encroaching on nearby constellations, like Apus. The cloud is well-studied for its treasury of young stars, particularly the cloud Cha I, which both Hubble and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope have imaged.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA; Acknowledgement: L. Shatz
#NASA #NASAGoddard #NASAMarshall #NASAGoddard #HubbleSpaceTelescope #HST #ESA #galaxy
The Vega-C Zefiro 40 second stage has now been transferred to and integrated at the Vega Launch Zone (Zone de Lancement Vega) ZLV at Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana on 4 May 2022.
On the wave of Vega’s success, Member States at the ESA Ministerial meeting in December 2014 agreed to develop the more powerful Vega-C to respond to an evolving market and to long-term institutional needs.
Vega-C increases performance from Vega’s current 1.5 t to about 2.2 t in a reference 700 km polar orbit, covering identified European institutional users’ mission needs, with no increase in launch service and operating costs.
The participating states in this development are: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.
Credits: ESA - M. Pedoussaut
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image offers us the chance to see a distant galaxy now some 19.5 billion light-years from Earth (but appearing as it did around 11 billion years ago, when the galaxy was 5.5 billion light-years away and began its trek to us through expanding space). Known as HerS 020941.1+001557, this remote galaxy appears as a red arc partially encircling a foreground elliptical galaxy located some 2.7 billion light-years away. Called SDSS J020941.27+001558.4, the elliptical galaxy appears as a bright dot at the center of the image with a broad haze of stars outward from its core. A third galaxy, called SDSS J020941.23+001600.7, seems to be intersecting part of the curving, red crescent of light created by the distant galaxy.
The alignment of this trio of galaxies creates a type of gravitational lens called an Einstein ring. Gravitational lenses occur when light from a very distant object bends (or is ‘lensed’) around a massive (or ‘lensing’) object located between us and the distant lensed galaxy. When the lensed object and the lensing object align, they create an Einstein ring. Einstein rings can appear as a full or partial circle of light around the foreground lensing object, depending on how precise the alignment is. The effects of this phenomenon are much too subtle to see on a local level but can become clearly observable when dealing with curvatures of light on enormous, astronomical scales.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, H. Nayyeri, L. Marchetti, J. Lowenthal
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy
Yo mismo.
Fotografia tomada por David Seguí mientras efectuaba una panorámica del atardecer en el mirador de la Fuente de la Cierva, en Sot de Chera, valencia.
La vieja casa en silencio
y ninguno se lo explica,
cómo pasan esa cosas
tan feliz que parecía.
Mi madre llora en el patio,
Pedro duerme en la cocina,
y ninguno se ha acordado
de que coman las gallinas.
María llega de lejos
ella que nunca venía,
y el tío Luis a mi hermano
le dice un par de mentiras.
El crucifijo de plata
se lo lleva Catalina,
la mecedora Francisco
y la mantilla Corina.
El perro no entiende nada,
el gato ya lo sabía,
él fue después del abuelo
el que más la conocía.
La vieja casa en silencio
y ninguno se lo explica,
cómo pasan esas cosas
tan feliz que parecía.
Cómo pasan esas cosas...
tan feliz que parecía!
ESAS COSAS
Facundo Cabral
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Fotografía tomada en la base del "Monte Calvario".
Ciudad de Tandil, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina.
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This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features Arp 122, a peculiar galaxy that in fact comprises two galaxies – NGC 6040, the tilted, warped spiral galaxy and LEDA 59642, the round, face-on spiral – that are in the midst of a collision. This dramatic cosmic encounter is located at the very safe distance of roughly 570 million light-years from Earth. Peeking in at the lower-left corner is the elliptical galaxy NGC 6041, a central member of the galaxy cluster that Arp 122 resides in, but otherwise not participating in this monster merger.
Galactic collisions and mergers are monumentally energetic and dramatic events, but they take place on a very slow timescale. For example, the Milky Way is on track to collide with its nearest galactic neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), but these two galaxies have a good four billion years to go before they actually meet. The process of colliding and merging will not be a quick one either: it might take hundreds of millions of years to unfold. These collisions take so long because of the truly massive distances involved.
Video credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA Acknowledgement: L. Shatz
#NASA #STScI #NASAGoddard #NASAMarshall #galaxy #HubbleSpaceTelescope #HST #galaxy
Cuantas veces has soñado con tocar esa nube, esa que te recuerda a un pájaro, a un dragón, a un personaje sacado de esos cuentos que te contaban antes de dormir?
Esa nube que se mueve y que te anda mirando y sonríe hasta desaparecer con el viento.
25/52 Nubes.
52 Semanas 2024
Sígueme en Instagram
Deliciosa sesión en Vegueta con la inmejorable compañía de Cristo Bolaños y la maravillosa modelo Ariadna Quintana
Esas palabras que tengo dentro de mí, dando vueltas en mi estómago, en mi corazón, palabras de amigos presentes y futuros, de abrazos y risas, de miradas que hablan.
Palabras completas. Quería vomitarlas y descansar.
2009, si eso es lo que deseo.
Retoque By Paula G. Furio (Punto G furió)
Ella es Lola, su mirada es hacia su compañera en la vida... mi madre.
Amor, fidelidad, adoración, obediencia...los perros no necesitan palabras para hacernos sentir lo mejor de sus vidas.
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows LEDA 42160, a galaxy about 52 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. The dwarf galaxy is one of many forcing its way through the comparatively dense gas in the massive Virgo cluster of galaxies. The pressure exerted by this intergalactic gas, known as ram pressure, has dramatic effects on star formation in LEDA 42160.
The gas and dust that permeates space exerts pressure on a galaxy as it moves. This resistance, called ram pressure, can strip a galaxy of its star-forming gas and dust, reducing or even stopping the creation of new stars. However, ram pressure can also compress gas in the galaxy, which can boost star formation.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Sun
#NASA #NASAGoddard #NASAMarshall #NASAGoddard #HubbleSpaceTelescope #HST #ESA #galaxy