NASA
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there where so many rock formations we encounter during our stay at Bandon bay, Oregon.....
I just want to send my congratulations to NASA for the remarkable mission to Pluto......they inspire all of us to have inquiring minds..... to always question; is there life, somewhere in our magnificent universe........................ dennis :))
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Una nasa es un arte de pesca tradicional que consiste en un cesto de forma cilíndrica hecho de red y un esqueleto de madera con una especie de embudo dirigido hacia dentro en su base.
Se utiliza para la pesca de mariscos (centollo, nécora, bogavante...) y de cefalópodos (pulpo).
Telling NASA's Tales With Hollywood's Tools
Space Center Uses Pixar's Palette To Artfully Explain Scientific Data
By Michael S. Rosenwald
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 21, 2006; D01
[We are lucky to be working with world class data visualizers and animators. This article in the Washington Post is one of the best print stories I've seen on the folks who are on the front lines of translating our science and making it accessible to our many audiences.]
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/20/...
Every once in a while when a new movie with mind-blowing special effects or oh-my-gosh-it-looked-so-real animation opens, a nondescript office at NASA Goddard Space Center in Greenbelt will mysteriously empty of employees during matinee hours.
Before an investigation is launched into the whereabouts of these workers -- particularly, say, around last year's opening of "Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith" -- understand that they are not blowing off work. The absentee employees are animators, NASA staffers and contractors who use the same software Pixar Animation Studios uses to tell stories about talking cars to instead tell stories about the Earth. They just want to see what their counterparts in Hollywood have been up to.
There is the occasional did-you-see-that elbow nudge, but in their case it's about craft, not cinematic delight, said Horace Mitchell, project manager at the space center's scientific visualization studio. Mitchell is a NASA employee, but the studio is staffed primarily by animators working for Global Science & Technology Inc., a government contractor in Greenbelt. The company uses the Hollywood software, including Pixar's RenderMan and Autodesk Inc.'s Maya, to translate complicated data into animated movies that illustrate what is happening in and around Earth. The videos often end up on the evening news.
The crucial difference in NASA's use of the software is that Hollywood uses it to spin inspiring, happy-ending stories about love and courage and friendship and hope, while the animators in Greenbelt are often telling stories about bad things happening in the atmosphere, such as last year's hurricane season. In their chilling short film "27 Storms: Arlene to Zeta," set to Vincenzo Bellini's eerie music, viewers can watch the ocean heat up, helping fuel one storm after another -- thanks to the same Pixar software used in the upcoming version of "Charlotte's Web."
NASA oceanographer Gene Carl Feldman frequently collaborates with the Global Science studio. He studies the ocean from space.
"Visualization is that link between the flood of data coming down from space and the ability of the human mind to interpret it," Feldman said. "That's the crux of the story. Better than most other groups in the world, they are able to take this fire hose of data coming down and turn it into images -- visual animation -- that then allows the general public to see this data in ways their brains can interpret and study."
The Hollywoodization of NASA data is in part the result of Pixar's success in creating real-life worlds from fantasy stories. People have come to expect that even the most fantastical of ideas -- a talking, curmudgeonly Mr. Potato Head -- can look and feel exceedingly real. "They don't expect to see crudity," Mitchell said. "They expect to see sophistication because they see it everywhere. In order for us to tell the story, we have to be sophisticated about telling stories and we have to use sophisticated technology to tell them."
Pixar was spun off from George Lucas's film company, and its early days were spent selling animation software and hardware -- a way to pay the bills until computer technology caught up with the firm's vision of making the incredibly life-like films that it produces today.
Today, anyone can purchase versions of RenderMan online, for $995 to $3,500.
Global Science, a private company that employs about 250 people, is definitely not a movie studio. It was founded in 1991 by Chieh-san Cheng, a former employee of an aerospace and technology company with advanced degrees in technical management and meteorology. Global Science provides services in applied science and research, geospatial standards, engineering services, and information technology. The firm's contract with NASA is a small part of its business, contributing about $650,000 a year to about $45 million in revenue.
Global Science and Pixar know about each other, but interaction between the staffs is generally limited to animation conferences and trade shows. But the Global Science staff does feel a strong bond with Pixar, particularly when watching one of its movies.
Jim Williams, a Global Science animator, said, "I'll go into it thinking I'm going to look at the technical stuff and then I'll get completely sucked into the story."
This happened during Pixar's recent hit, "Cars."
"I'm watching it, I'm totally into the story, and they get to the end and they go into that stadium, and there's tens of thousands of cars in there and I drop out of the story and think, 'Wow, that must have been a pain in the butt to get that right.' And then I'm back into the story," he said.
The difference between the storylines is that Pixar is trying to get laughing cars right and Global Science is trying to get the atmosphere right. The way in which Global Science uses RenderMan is not easy. Here's one way of looking at it: This article has been typed on a word processor. The computer received the data -- in this case, they looked like letters -- and displayed them on a screen. The lines were long, containing dozens of words. Those words needed to appear in the newspaper, and to do that a graphic designer used another program to render and squeeze the words into narrow columns of newsprint, with black type, a font, and italics , and so forth so the words appear in the paper as they do now. That's essentially what RenderMan does for data -- whether it be information about Buzz Lightyear's appearance or atmospheric models of hurricanes. RenderMan is the mechanism by which data are translated. Another program, Maya, acts as the word processor.
Global Science translates scientific data this way. Recently, one of its animators sat behind a computer monitor in a dark room with an image that could have appeared as a backdrop in a Van Gogh painting. But it was a depiction of aerosols moving across the atmosphere, a way of illustrating air quality. Yellow represented dust, the green was sulfates produced by humans, the blue was sea salt. Altogether, it was sort of beautiful but apparently not good news for the atmosphere.
Like their Hollywood counterparts, the Global Science animators typically refer to their finished products as releases, but the scripts are composed of data and the script writers are some of the world's most brilliant scientists. The creative process generally works like this: A scientist or a public affairs officer will ask the animators to illustrate a concept or data set. It can be as simple as ocean temperatures or as complicated as a collection of satellite images. A discussion with the scientific team and public affairs officer ensues over the best way to illustrate the data, and the animators get to work.
Feldman, the NASA oceanographer, studies oceans from space because, as he said: "Oceans are really, really, really big and they change very, very quickly. You can't track that from a ship. What a satellite sees in a minute would take a ship a decade." Feldman is particularly interested in the relationship between the changing environment and ocean life, which he pursues by studying the first level of life in the ocean, or microscopic plants, through ocean color.
The only problem is that satellites collect a very large amount of complicated data. The visualization studio helps him make sense of it. Feldman has made animations of what happened to the ocean during the transition between El Niño and La Niña -- "it was the biggest phytoplankton bloom in the world ever observed," he said. He has animated Lake Michigan's microscopic plant blooms and a dust storm the size of Spain that blew across the ocean in the past few years. He has animated autumn in Boston, which roughly translates into, as he put it, "how life follows the sun."
If Cheng, chief executive of Global Science, has his way, NASA scientists wouldn't be the only people relying on his firm's handling of Hollywood software to explain complicated subjects. Cheng would like to use the software to better explain the human body to doctors. He said the company is finalizing plans for a medical-imaging division and is exploring the possibility of a partnership with Maryland universities.
"What we could do is use movie techniques to give the doctor and medical staff more dynamic and accurate images to make a diagnosis," he said.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
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A 1997 image of the planet Mars.
This is a supporting image for the "Sailing With NASA" blog, which is documenting space shuttle external tank ET-134's sea voyage from Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Credit: NASA
Follow the Sailing With NASA blog:
for some reason or another NASA is prepared to spend billions hoping to find some signs of life far away, but no need to go far to find some life where you don't expect it.....NASA would be ecstatic with such a MARS shot....
NASA PIC OF THE DAY:
Explanation: A volcano on Krakatoa is still erupting. Perhaps most famous for the powerfully explosive eruption in 1883 that killed tens of thousands of people, ash from a violent eruption might also have temporarily altered Earth's climate as long as 1500 years ago. In 1927, eruptions caused smaller Anak Krakatau to rise from the sea, and the emerging volcanic island continues to grow at an average rate of 2 cm per day. The latest eruption of Anak Krakatau started in 2008 April and continues today. In this picture, Anak Krakatau is seen erupting from Rakata, the main island of the Krakatoai group. High above, stars including the Big Dipper are clearly apparent.
OYEZ, OYEZ, LA NASA VOUS L'ANNONCE…
Suspense et excitation !
L'agence américaine préparait le spectacle depuis des jours et même des semaines en diffusant une bande-annonce digne d'un show hollywoodien pour préparer les spectateurs à une « simple » annonce de l'équipage d'Artemis II.
Bien entendu, il s'agit d'un SYMBOLE !
Les quatre astronautes seront les premiers depuis Apollo 17 à partir aussi loin autour de notre satellite naturel, et ils représentent pour la NASA un espoir renouvelé autant que l'un des grands points d'orgue d'un programme qui a mis plus d'une décennie à voir le jour.
Cette « nouvelle conquête lunaire » doit d'abord marquer les esprits et bénéficier de l'appui politique et du grand public … Eh oui !!!
D'où ce côté spectacle assumé !
L'ensemble des astronautes présents à Houston se trouvait sur scène, y compris ceux des pays partenaires en formation.
Il y avait aussi les dirigeants de la NASA et François-Philippe Champagne, le pétillant ministre canadien en charge du spatial dans le gouvernement en place.
En effet, cet équipage est bien composé de trois membres de la NASA et d'un Canadien. On retrouve donc Reid Wiseman (commandant), Victor Glover (pilote), Christina Koch (spécialiste de mission) et le Canadien Jeremy Hansen (spécialiste de mission) 😉
Bonne journée les artistes :D
**********************************************************************************
HEAR, HEAR, NASA ANNOUNCES IT TO YOU...
Suspense and excitement!
The American agency had been preparing the show for days and even weeks by releasing a trailer worthy of a Hollywood show to prepare viewers for a "simple" announcement from the crew of Artemis II.
Of course, it is a symbol!
The four astronauts will be the first since Apollo 17 to travel this far around our natural satellite, and they represent renewed hope for NASA as much as one of the great culmination points of a program that has taken more than a decade to come.
This “new lunar conquest” must first mark the spirits and benefit from the political support and the general public… Yes!!!
Hence this assumed side of the show!
All the astronauts present in Houston were on stage, including those of the partner countries in training.
There were also the leaders of NASA and François-Philippe Champagne, the sparkling Canadian minister in charge of space in the government in place.
Indeed, this crew is indeed made up of three NASA members and a Canadian. So we find Reid Wiseman (commander), Victor Glover (pilot), Christina Koch (mission specialist) and Canadian Jeremy Hansen (mission specialist) 😉
Good day artists :D
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Launch Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center! The CRS-10 mission was the companies tenth commercial resupply service mission to the International Space Station.
This image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope features the Grand Design Spiral, NGC 3631, located some 53 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major. The “arms” of grand design spirals appear to wind around and into the galaxy’s nucleus.
Close inspection of NGC 3631’s grand spiral arms reveals dark dust lanes and bright star-forming regions along the inner part of the spiral arms. Star formation in spirals is similar to a traffic jam on the interstate. Like cars on the highway, slower moving matter in the spiral’s disk creates a bottleneck, concentrating star-forming gas and dust along the inner part of their spiral arms. This traffic jam of matter can get so dense that it gravitationally collapses, creating new stars (here seen in bright blue-white).
The image uses data collected from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys. The color blue represents visible wavelengths of blue light, and the color orange represents infrared light.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Filippenko (University of California - Berkeley), and D. Sand (University of Arizona); Image Processing: G. Kober (NASA Goddard/Catholic University of America)
#NASA #MarshallSpaceFlightCenter #MSFC #Marshall #HubbleSpaceTelescope #HST #astrophysics #gsfc #galaxy
Location B. Goyedhu
This place is built by the youth of this small community of 600 people. Maintained by The Organization for youths in this island (Goyedhoo Zuvaanunnge Jamiyya). This place is the islands social centre. And this place was named NaSa because of the mocking words of the elders. They Called it a Naaseege (whore house).
Inside is equipped with Cable TV. Chess Games. etc
I did not take these photos which came from the NASA website from Mexico during the eclipse April 8/24 . I stitched them together in Photoshop to demonstrate this magnificent event. I just wish I could have been there to see it. The next eclipses in North America are in 2044 and 2045 when I will be in my mid-nineties!!!
Listen to Bonny Tyler's song: Total Eclipse of the Heart
Don't forget tonight is the lunar eclipse in some places around the world.
More fiddling with flood. Something a little different. The moon is real, the water is fantasy.
Norfolk Southern train #052 eases through Dallas, GA with 12 rocket booster sections bound for NASA at Cape Canaveral for use on the Artemis Program. The longest days of the year may be hot but they sure are great for times like these.
NASA image captured September 26, 2011
Many aurora appear green, but sometimes — as in this image from the International Space Station — other colors such as red can appear. The colors depend on which atoms are causing the splash of light seen in the aurora. In most cases, the light comes when a charged particle sweeps in from the solar wind and collides with an oxygen atom in Earth’s atmosphere. This produces a green photon, so most aurora appear green. However, lower-energy oxygen collisions as well as collisions with nitrogen atoms can produce red photons -- so sometimes aurora also show a red band as seen here.
Karen Fox
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Credit: NASA
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.
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By pushing NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to its limits, an international team of astronomers has shattered the cosmic distance record by measuring the farthest galaxy ever seen in the universe. This surprisingly bright infant galaxy, named GN-z11, is seen as it was 13.4 billion years in the past, just 400 million years after the Big Bang. GN-z11 is located in the direction of the constellation of Ursa Major.
Read more: go.nasa.gov/1oSqHad
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.
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This February 8, 2016 composite image reveals the complex distribution of phytoplankton in one of Earth's eastern boundary upwelling systems — the California Current. Recent work suggests that our warming climate my be increasing the intensity of upwelling in such regions with possible repercussions for the species that comprise those ecosystems.
NASA's OceanColor Web is supported by the Ocean Biology Processing Group (OBPG) at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Our responsibilities include the collection, processing, calibration, validation, archive and distribution of ocean-related products from a large number of operational, satellite-based remote-sensing missions providing ocean color, sea surface temperature and sea surface salinity data to the international research community since 1996.
Credit: NASA/Goddard/Suomin-NPP/VIIRS
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.
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In this rare image taken on July 19, 2013, the wide-angle camera on NASA's Cassini spacecraft has captured Saturn's rings and our planet Earth and its moon in the same frame. It is only one footprint in a mosaic of 33 footprints covering the entire Saturn ring system (including Saturn itself). At each footprint, images were taken in different spectral filters for a total of 323 images: some were taken for scientific purposes and some to produce a natural color mosaic. This is the only wide-angle footprint that has the Earth-moon system in it.
The dark side of Saturn, its bright limb, the main rings, the F ring, and the G and E rings are clearly seen; the limb of Saturn and the F ring are overexposed. The "breaks" in the brightness of Saturn's limb are due to the shadows of the rings on the globe of Saturn, preventing sunlight from shining through the atmosphere in those regions. The E and G rings have been brightened for better visibility.
Earth, which is 898 million miles (1.44 billion kilometers) away in this image, appears as a blue dot at center right; the moon can be seen as a fainter protrusion off its right side. An arrow indicates their location in the annotated version. (The two are clearly seen as separate objects in the accompanying narrow angle frame: PIA14949.) The other bright dots nearby are stars.
This is only the third time ever that Earth has been imaged from the outer solar system. The acquisition of this image, along with the accompanying composite narrow- and wide-angle image of Earth and the moon and the full mosaic from which both are taken, marked the first time that inhabitants of Earth knew in advance that their planet was being imaged. That opportunity allowed people around the world to join together in social events to celebrate the occasion.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 20 degrees below the ring plane.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on July 19, 2013 at a distance of approximately 753,000 miles (1.212 million kilometers) from Saturn, and approximately 898.414 million miles (1.445858 billion kilometers) from Earth. Image scale on Saturn is 43 miles (69 kilometers) per pixel; image scale on the Earth is 53,820 miles (86,620 kilometers) per pixel. The illuminated areas of neither Earth nor the Moon are resolved here.
Consequently, the size of each "dot" is the same size that a point of light of comparable brightness would have in the wide-angle camera.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, 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, D.C. 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, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit www.nasa.gov/cassini and saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Arches of magnetic field lines towered over the sun’s edge as a pair of active regions began to rotate into view in this video captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory on April 5-6, 2016. Active regions are areas of very concentrated magnetic field. Charged particles spiraling along these magnetic fields emit extreme ultraviolet light, which is typically not visible to our eyes, but colorized here in gold. The light given off from the particles helps trace out the magnetic field lines, which are otherwise invisible.
Scientists use images such as this to observe how magnetic fields move around the sun and learn more about what causes active regions.
Credit: NASA/Goddard/SDO
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.
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Thanks to Jesssica Truscott for this image:
faestock.deviantart.com/art/Sophia-Female-Stock-Reference...
Thanks to NASA for elements of this image.
SOFIA, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, is a Boeing 747SP aircraft modified to carry a 2.7-meter (106-inch) reflecting telescope (with an effective diameter of 2.5 meters or 100 inches).
In March 2014, a team of scientists returned to the Arctic with NASA’s P-3 aircraft to continue Operation IceBridge, a multi-year aerial survey of polar ice. IceBridge is designed to maintain the continuity of measurements between NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), which stopped functioning in 2009, and its successor, ICESat-2, which is scheduled for launch in 2017.
The first science flight of this year’s campaign occurred on March 12, with the P-3 taking off from Thule Air Base in Greenland to survey sea ice over the Fram Strait. The belly of the plane was packed with radars, altimeters, gravimeters, and an array of sensors designed to yield a three-dimensional view of the ice. Scientists on the plane also had less exotic sensors with them: cameras. Michael Studinger, the IceBridge project scientist, captured this photograph of the Moon and the glow of morning sunlight on snow-covered peaks in northeastern Greenland.
Photograph by Michael Studinger. Caption by Adam Voiland, with information from George Hale.
Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.
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NASA's Gulfstream made a stop at Glasgow for fuel and crew change en-route from Kazakhstan to Houston on the 6th April. Carrying Astronaut Loral O'Hara who returned to Earth earlier that day after a six-month research mission aboard the International Space Station.
NASA
Gulfstream Aerospace GV
N95NA
Glasgow Airport, Scotland
6th April 2024
NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration)
Gulfstream G-III N992NA
Touching down at Prestwick Airport
Freshly painted, the F-16XL undergoes maintenance in the NASA hangar in Hampton, Virginia. Olympus Stylus 35mm f3.5.
With a sudden “crack!” of pyrotechnics, a mockup of NASA’s Orion spacecraft released its grip on a set of cables and began a graceful, deliberate dive toward a pool 14 feet below.
Instead of an Olympic-style feat of athletics, it was a mighty stroke of engineering — and an essential step forward in NASA’s journey to Mars.
Onlookers gathered near the Hydro Impact Basin at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, applauded and cheered. They had just witnessed the simulated water landing of a space capsule, through the use of a 7.2-ton mockup covered with sensors capable of detecting forces that the structure and its astronaut crew would experience.
For more information about NASA's journey to Mars, click here.