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JPL News - Day in Review

 

DAY IN REVIEW Close Views Show Saturn's Rings in Unprecedented Detail Newly released images showcase the incredible closeness with which NASA's Cassini spacecraft, now in its "Ring-Grazing" orbits phase, is observing Saturn's dazzling rings of icy debris. › Read the full story New Planet Imager Delivers First Science A new device on the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii has delivered its first images, showing a ring of planet-forming dust around a star. › Read the full story

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

 

DAY IN REVIEW Storms Filled 37 Percent of CA Snow-Water Deficit The "atmospheric river" weather patterns that pummeled California with storms from late December to late January may have recouped 37 percent of the state's five-year snow-water deficit, according to new University of Colorado Boulder-led research using NASA satellite data. Researchers at the university's Center for Water Earth Science and Technology (CWEST) estimate that two powerful recent storms deposited roughly 17.5-million acre feet (21.6 cubic kilometers) of water on California's Sierra Nevada range in January. Compared to averages from the pre-drought satellite record, that amount represents more than 120 percent of the typical annual snow accumulation for this range. Snowmelt from the range is a critical water source for the state's agriculture, hydropower generation and municipal water supplies. To derive the estimate, the researchers combined data from NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on NASA's Aqua and Terra spacecraft; a computer model jointly developed by the University of Colorado and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California; and ground-based snow sensor data from the California Department of Water Resources, Sacramento. Snow-water deficit is the deficit in water stored in snowpack compared with the annual average water stored in snowpack before the drought began in 2012. On average, California experienced a snow-water deficit of approximately 10.8-million acre feet (13.3 cubic kilometers) per year during the drought years of 2012 through 2016. The total deficit over that five-year period is roughly 54 million acre feet (67 cubic kilometers). The recent storms appear to have reduced that total by roughly 37 percent in less than one month. Atmospheric rivers -- such as the so-called Pineapple Express phenomenon that affects the U.S. West Coast -- funnel large amounts of moisture out of the tropics and bring heavy rain and snow over short periods of time. In January, most of the higher elevations in northern California received more than 10 feet (3 meters) of snow in just over two weeks, with some locations receiving more than 20 feet (6 meters). "Early in the January storm cycle, lower mountain elevations received some rain, but the vast majority of the mountain precipitation has come as snow -- which is exactly the way we need this precipitation," said Thomas Painter, a snow scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, and principal investigator of NASA's Airborne Snow Observatory. "As snow, it releases to reservoirs and ecosystems more gradually and efficiently over the summer months." Noah Molotch, who led the new study, cautioned that there is still a long way to go before California makes up its snow-water deficit completely. Molotch is director of CWEST and a research scientist at JPL. "When the snow stopped falling five years ago, the state had to tap into its groundwater reserves to keep up," Molotch said. "One snowy winter won't be able to entirely reverse that, but there is, at least, some cautious optimism." Molotch indicated that, with the much-needed snow, the recent storms also brought some flood risk. "The concern moving forward relates to what happens with the weather for the rest of the winter," said Molotch. "Reservoirs across the Sierra foothills are now relatively full. If we get another intense atmospheric river with warmer air temperatures, that could lead to melting of the snowpack, and the risk for rain-induced flooding is considerable." "The start to winter has been the best California has seen since 2011 and gives water managers hope for relief from what has been a historically dry five-year period," said David Rizzardo, chief of Snow Surveys and Water Supply Forecasting for the California Department of Water Resources. "The valuable data gathered by the CWEST and NASA Earth science teams gives the California Department of Water Resources a broader sense for how much water is being stored in our snowpack, allowing us to fine-tune vital seasonal runoff estimates, which are used by water managers and reservoir operators across the state." The California Department of Water Resources will release the results of its most recent snow survey on Feb. 2. Final data will be available at that time.

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

 

DAY IN REVIEW A New Test for Life on Other Planets A simple chemistry method could vastly enhance how scientists search for signs of life on other planets. The test uses a liquid-based technique known as capillary electrophoresis to separate a mixture of organic molecules into its components. It was designed specifically to analyze for amino acids, the structural building blocks of all life on Earth. The method is 10,000 times more sensitive than current methods employed by spacecraft like NASA's Mars Curiosity rover, according to a new study published in Analytical Chemistry. The study was carried out by researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. One of the key advantages of the authors' new way of using capillary electrophoresis is that the process is relatively simple and easy to automate for liquid samples expected on ocean world missions: it involves combining a liquid sample with a liquid reagent, followed by chemical analysis under conditions determined by the team. By shining a laser across the mixture -- a process known as laser-induced fluorescence detection -- specific molecules can be observed moving at different speeds. They get separated based on how quickly they respond to electric fields. While capillary electrophoresis has been around since the early 1980s, this is the first time it has been tailored specifically to detect extraterrestrial life on an ocean world, said lead author Jessica Creamer, a postdoctoral scholar at JPL. "Our method improves on previous attempts by increasing the number of amino acids that can be detected in a single run," Creamer said. "Additionally, it allows us to detect these amino acids at very low concentrations, even in highly salty samples, with a very simple 'mix and analyze' process." The researchers used the technique to analyze amino acids present in the salt-rich waters of Mono Lake in California. The lake's exceptionally high alkaline content makes it a challenging habitat for life, and an excellent stand-in for salty waters believed to be on Mars, or the ocean worlds of Saturn's moon Enceladus and Jupiter's moon Europa. The researchers were able to simultaneously analyze 17 different amino acids, which they are calling "the Signature 17 standard." These amino acids were chosen for study because they are the most commonly found on Earth or elsewhere. "Using our method, we are able to tell the difference between amino acids that come from non-living sources like meteorites versus amino acids that come from living organisms," said the project's principal investigator, Peter Willis of JPL. Key to detecting amino acids related to life is an aspect known as "chirality." Chiral molecules such as amino acids come in two forms that are mirror images of one another. Although amino acids from non-living sources contain approximately equal amounts of the "left" and "right"-handed forms, amino acids from living organisms on Earth are almost exclusively the "left-handed" form. It is expected that amino acid life elsewhere would also need to "choose" one of the two forms in order to create the structures of life. For this reason, chirality of amino acids is considered one of the most powerful signatures of life. "One of NASA's highest-level objectives is the search for life in the universe," Willis said. "Our best chance of finding life is by using powerful liquid-based analyses like this one on ocean worlds." Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages JPL for NASA.

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

 

DAY IN REVIEW Similar-Looking Ridges on Mars Have Diverse Origins Thin, blade-like walls, some as tall as a 16-story building, dominate a previously undocumented network of intersecting ridges on Mars, found in images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. › Read the full story Study Tracks 'Memory' of Soil Moisture The first year of data from NASA's SMAP mission provides surprising findings that will help in forecasting weather and monitoring crop growth. › Read the full story

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

 

DAY IN REVIEW NuSTAR Finds New Clues to 'Chameleon Supernova' The supernova SN 2014C dramatically changed in appearance over the course of a year, apparently because it had thrown off a lot of material late in its life. › Read the full story NASA Dust-on-Snow Data Help Colorado River Managers NASA measures the dust on the Colorado and Utah snowpack to help forecast water supplies in the Colorado River Basin. › Read the full story

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

 

DAY IN REVIEW Public to Choose Jupiter Picture Sites for NASA Juno Where should NASA's Juno spacecraft aim its camera during its next close pass of Jupiter on Feb. 2? You can now play a part in the decision. For the first time, members of the public can vote to participate in selecting all pictures to be taken of Jupiter during a Juno flyby. Voting begins Thursday, Jan. 19 at 11 a.m. PST (2 p.m. EST) and concludes on Jan. 23 at 9 a.m. PST (noon EST). "We are looking forward to people visiting our website and becoming part of the JunoCam imaging team," said Candy Hansen, Juno co-investigator from the Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Arizona. "It's up to the public to determine the best locations in Jupiter's atmosphere for JunoCam to capture during this flyby." NASA's JunoCam website can be visited at: https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam The voting page for this flyby is available at: https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/voting/ JunoCam will begin taking pictures as the spacecraft approaches Jupiter's north pole. Two hours later, the imaging will conclude as the spacecraft completes its close flyby, departing from below the gas giant's south pole. Juno is currently on its fourth orbit around Jupiter. It takes 53 days for Juno to complete one orbit. "The pictures JunoCam can take depict a narrow swath of territory the spacecraft flies over, so the points of interest imaged can provide a great amount of detail," said Hansen. "They play a vital role in helping the Juno science team establish what is going on in Jupiter's atmosphere at any moment. We are looking forward to seeing what people from outside the science team think is important." There will be a new voting page for each upcoming flyby of the mission. On each of the pages, several points of interest will be highlighted that are known to come within the JunoCam field of view during the next close approach. Each participant will get a limited number of votes per orbit to devote to the points of interest he or she wants imaged. After the flyby is complete, the raw images will be posted to the JunoCam website, where the public can perform its own processing. "It is great to be able to share excitement and science from the Juno mission with the public in this way," said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "Amateur scientists, artists, students and whole classrooms are providing the world with their unique perspectives of Jupiter. I am really pleased that this website is having such a big impact and allowing so many people to join the Juno science team. The public involvement is really affecting how we look at the most massive planetary inhabitant in our solar system." During the Feb. 2 flyby, Juno will make its closest approach to Jupiter at 4:58 a.m. PST (7:58 a.m. EST), when the spacecraft is about 2,700 miles (4,300 kilometers) above the planet's swirling clouds. JunoCam is a color, visible-light camera designed to capture remarkable pictures of Jupiter's poles and cloud tops. As Juno's eyes, it will provide a wide view of Jupiter over the course of the mission, helping to provide context for the spacecraft's other instruments. JunoCam was included on the spacecraft primarily for public engagement purposes, although its images also are helpful to the science team. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. The Juno mission is part of the New Frontiers Program managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. JPL is a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California. More information on the Juno mission is available at: http://www.nasa.gov/juno http://www.missionjuno.swri.edu The public can follow the mission on Facebook and Twitter at: http://www.facebook.com/NASAJuno http://www.twitter.com/NASAJuno

 

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NASA/JPL Educator Workshop - Marsbound and the Search for Life

 

Marsbound and the Search for Life – Educator Workshop When: Saturday, Feb. 11, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Where: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California Target Audience: Formal and informal educators for grades K-12 Overview: In this workshop, educators will learn how to use the engineering design process while teaching students to identify criteria for success and work within project limitations. With a focus on academic language, this activity has participants create and evaluate the next generation of satellites and rovers for space exploration. › Submit a reservation request Questions? Call the Educator Resource Center at 818-393-5917. Can't attend the workshop? Explore these lessons online Marsbound – This board-game activity teaches students the process of design, engineering and technology for a mission to Mars. Looking for Life – Using the fundamental criteria for life, students examine simulated extraterrestrial soil samples for signs of life. This free workshop is offered through the NASA/JPL Educator Resource Center, which provides formal and informal educators with NASA resources and materials that support STEM learning. Discover More From NASA Space Place NASA Space Place is a premier destination for science, technology, engineering and mathematics content for children between the ages of 8 and 13. Subscribe to The Space Place Newsletter to discover new educational games, videos and hands-on activities.

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

 

DAY IN REVIEW Mars Rover Curiosity Examines Possible Mud Cracks Scientists used NASA's Curiosity Mars rover in recent weeks to examine slabs of rock cross-hatched with shallow ridges that likely originated as cracks in drying mud. "Mud cracks are the most likely scenario here," said Curiosity science team member Nathan Stein. He is a graduate student at Caltech in Pasadena, California, who led the investigation of a site called "Old Soaker," on lower Mount Sharp, Mars. If this interpretation holds up, these would be the first mud cracks -- technically called desiccation cracks -- confirmed by the Curiosity mission. They would be evidence that the ancient era when these sediments were deposited included some drying after wetter conditions. Curiosity has found evidence of ancient lakes in older, lower-lying rock layers and also in younger mudstone that is above Old Soaker. "Even from a distance, we could see a pattern of four- and five-sided polygons that don't look like fractures we've seen previously with Curiosity," Stein said. "It looks like what you'd see beside the road where muddy ground has dried and cracked." The cracked layer formed more than 3 billion years ago and was subsequently buried by other layers of sediment, all becoming stratified rock. Later, wind erosion stripped away the layers above Old Soaker. Material that had filled the cracks resisted erosion better than the mudstone around it, so the pattern from the cracking now appears as raised ridges. The team used Curiosity to examine the crack-filling material. Cracks that form at the surface, such as in drying mud, generally fill with windblown dust or sand. A different type of cracking with plentiful examples found by Curiosity occurs after sediments have hardened into rock. Pressure from accumulation of overlying sediments can cause underground fractures in the rock. These fractures generally have been filled by minerals delivered by groundwater circulating through the cracks, such as bright veins of calcium sulfate. Both types of crack-filling material were found at Old Soaker. This may indicate multiple generations of fracturing: mud cracks first, with sediment accumulating in them, then a later episode of underground fracturing and vein forming. "If these are indeed mud cracks, they fit well with the context of what we're seeing in the section of Mount Sharp Curiosity has been climbing for many months," said Curiosity Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. "The ancient lakes varied in depth and extent over time, and sometimes disappeared. We're seeing more evidence of dry intervals between what had been mostly a record of long-lived lakes." Besides the cracks that are likely due to drying, other types of evidence observed in the area include sandstone layers interspersed with the mudstone layers, and the presence of a layering pattern called cross-bedding. This pattern can form where water was flowing more vigorously near the shore of a lake, or from windblown sediment during a dry episode. Scientists are continuing to analyze data acquired at the possible mud cracks and also watching for similar-looking sites. They want to check for clues not evident at Old Soaker, such as the cross-sectional shape of the cracks. The rover has departed that site, heading uphill toward a future rock-drilling location. Rover engineers at JPL are determining the best way to resume use of the rover's drill, which began experiencing intermittent problems last month with the mechanism that moves the drill up and down during drilling. Curiosity landed near Mount Sharp in 2012. It reached the base of the mountain in 2014 after successfully finding evidence on the surrounding plains that ancient Martian lakes offered conditions that would have been favorable for microbes if Mars has ever hosted life. Rock layers forming the base of Mount Sharp accumulated as sediment within ancient lakes billions of years ago. On Mount Sharp, Curiosity is investigating how and when the habitable ancient conditions known from the mission's earlier findings evolved into conditions drier and less favorable for life. For more information about Curiosity, visit: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

 

DAY IN REVIEW NASA Plans Another Busy Year for Earth Science Fieldwork NASA scientists, including many from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, are crisscrossing the globe in 2017 -- from a Hawaiian volcano to Colorado mountaintops and west Pacific islands -- to investigate critical scientific questions about how our planet is changing and what impacts humans are having on it. Field experiments are an important part of NASA's Earth science research. Scientists worldwide use the agency's field data, together with satellite observations and computer models, to tackle environmental challenges and advance our knowledge of how Earth works as a complex, integrated system. "At NASA we are always pushing the boundaries of what can be done from space to advance science and improve lives around the world," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "These field campaigns help us build better tools to address such issues as managing scarce water resources and alerting the public to natural disasters." New Investigations Three new field campaigns kick off this month. Scientists preparing for a future Hyperspectral Infrared Imager (HyspIRI) mission will take to the skies above Hawaii to collect airborne data on coral reef health and volcanic emissions and eruptions. This airborne experiment supports a potential HyspIRI satellite mission to study the world's ecosystems and provide information on natural disasters. Scientists working on another future satellite -- the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission -- set sail in January from Hawaii. The month-long sea campaign across the Pacific on the research vessel Falkor will monitor the diversity of oceanic phytoplankton, microscopic plant-like organisms, and their impact on the marine carbon cycle. Novel measurements will be compared to existing satellite observations and used in preparation for the PACE mission. In February, the SnowEx airborne campaign begins flights over the snow-covered forests of Colorado for the first of a multiyear effort to determine how much water is stored in Earth's terrestrial snow-covered regions. Continuing Investigations In addition to the new field campaigns, eight Earth science projects will continue this year. The second deployment of NASA's Atmospheric Tomography (ATom) mission begins in January with a 28-day flight around the world. ATom will gather measurements of more than 200 different gases, as well as aerosols from the air near the ocean surface to approximately 7 miles (11 kilometers) altitude. The goal is to understand the sources, movement and transformation of short-lived greenhouse gases, such as ozone and methane, which are important contributors to climate change. The Atmospheric Carbon and Transport -- America (ACT-America) research team returns to the skies over the eastern half of the United States in January to continue tracking the movement of atmospheric carbon, the objective being to better understand the sources and sinks of greenhouse gases. Flights will originate from Louisiana, Nebraska and Virginia. Three field campaigns are heading to the Arctic. In March, Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) will conduct its second set of airborne surveys of glacier heights around the edge of Greenland and coastal ocean conditions. The mission is providing the first comprehensive look at how glaciers and oceans change year to year. Operation IceBridge returns in March to the Arctic for the ninth straight year to measure changes in the elevation of the Greenland ice sheet and sea ice extent. In the fall, the team also will begin its yearly measurements of land and sea ice in Antarctica. This summer, the Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) will start the airborne component of its decade-long campaign that began last year to study the ecology of the fast-changing northern reaches of Alaska and Canada. A diverse suite of instruments will be flown to investigate the region's permafrost, carbon cycle, vegetation and water bodies and inform future satellite missions. Scientists will also go into the field to support the airborne measurements. Two experiments head back to the Pacific Ocean this year. In February, the Coral Reef Airborne Laboratory (CORAL) project team will continue its airborne and in-water investigations in the Hawaiian Islands to assess the condition of threatened coral-based ecosystems. In the spring, CORAL will target the waters off Palau and Guam and the rest of the Mariana Islands. In October, NASA's second Salinity Processes in the Upper Ocean Regional Study (SPURS-2) returns to the eastern tropical Pacific to recover instruments installed in September to investigate the oceanic and atmospheric processes that control changes in salinity. On the other side of the world, two field campaigns are returning to the Atlantic Ocean. From its base in Namibia, the Observations of Clouds above Aerosols and their Interactions (ORACLES) study will use airborne instruments this fall to probe the impact on climate and rainfall of the interaction between clouds over the southeastern Atlantic Ocean and smoke from vegetation burning in southern Africa. The North Atlantic Aerosols and Marine Ecosystems Study (NAAMES) will take to the sea and air, for the third year, to study how the world's largest plankton bloom gives rise to small organic particles that influence clouds and climate. To follow all of NASA's 2017 Earth science field campaigns, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/earthexpeditions NASA collects data from space, air, land and sea to increase our understanding of our home planet, improve lives and safeguard our future. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth's interconnected natural systems with long-term data records. The agency freely shares this unique knowledge and works with institutions around the world to gain new insights into how our planet is changing. For more information about NASA's Earth science activities, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/earth

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

 

LATEST NEWS Huygens: 'Ground Truth' From an Alien Moon 2005 Historic Descent to Titan Revisited After a two-and-a-half-hour descent, the metallic, saucer-shaped spacecraft came to rest with a thud on a dark floodplain covered in cobbles of water ice, in temperatures hundreds of degrees below freezing. The alien probe worked frantically to collect and transmit images and data about its environs -- in mere minutes its mothership would drop below the local horizon, cutting off its link to the home world and silencing its voice forever. Although it may seem the stuff of science fiction, this scene played out 12 years ago on the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. The "aliens" who built the probe were us. This was the triumphant landing of ESA's Huygens probe. Huygens, a project of the European Space Agency, traveled to Titan as the companion to NASA's Cassini spacecraft, and then separated from its mothership on Dec. 24, 2004, for a 20-day coast toward its destiny at Titan. The probe sampled Titan's dense, hazy atmosphere as it slowly rotated beneath its parachutes, analyzing the complex organic chemistry and measuring winds. It also took hundreds of images during the descent, revealing bright, rugged highlands that were crosscut by dark drainage channels and steep ravines. The area where the probe touched down was a dark, granular surface, which resembled a dry lakebed. Thoughts on Huygens Today the Huygens probe sits silently on the frigid surface of Titan, its mission concluded mere hours after touchdown, while the Cassini spacecraft continues the exploration of Titan from above as part of its mission to learn more about Saturn and its moons. Now in its dramatic final year, the spacecraft's own journey will conclude on September 15 with a fateful plunge into Saturn's atmosphere. With the mission heading into its home stretch, Cassini team members and NASA leaders look back fondly on the significance of Huygens: "The Huygens descent and landing represented a major breakthrough in our exploration of Titan as well as the first soft landing on an outer-planet moon. It completely changed our understanding of this haze-covered ocean world." -- Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California "The Huygens images were everything our images from orbit were not. Instead of hazy, sinuous features that we could only guess were streams and drainage channels, here was incontrovertible evidence that at some point in Titan's history -- and perhaps even now -- there were flowing liquid hydrocarbons on the surface. Huygens' images became a Rosetta stone for helping us interpret our subsequent findings on Titan." -- Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team lead at Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado "Cassini and Huygens have shown us that Titan is an amazing world with a landscape that mimics Earth in many ways. During its descent, the Huygens probe captured views that demonstrated an entirely new dimension to that comparison and highlights that there is so much more we have yet to discover. For me, Huygens has emphasized why it is so important that we continue to explore Titan." -- Alex Hayes, a Cassini scientist at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York "Twelve years ago, a small probe touched down on an orangish, alien world in the outer solar system, marking humankind's most distant landing to date. Studying Titan helps us tease out the potential of habitability of this tiny world and better understand the chemistry of the early Earth." -- Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA Headquarters, Washington A collection of Huygens' top science findings is available from ESA at: http://sci.esa.int/huygens-titan-science-highlights The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter. More information about Cassini: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

 

DAY IN REVIEW Black Holes Hide in Our Cosmic Backyard Monster black holes sometimes lurk behind gas and dust, hiding from the gaze of most telescopes. But they give themselves away when material they feed on emits high-energy X-rays that NASA's NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) mission can detect. That's how NuSTAR recently identified two gas-enshrouded supermassive black holes, located at the centers of nearby galaxies. "These black holes are relatively close to the Milky Way, but they have remained hidden from us until now," said Ady Annuar, a graduate student at Durham University in the United Kingdom, who presented the results at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Grapevine, Texas. "They're like monsters hiding under your bed." Both of these black holes are the central engines of what astronomers call "active galactic nuclei," a class of extremely bright objects that includes quasars and blazars. Depending on how these galactic nuclei are oriented and what sort of material surrounds them, they appear very different when examined with telescopes. Active galactic nuclei are so bright because particles in the regions around the black hole get very hot and emit radiation across the full electromagnetic spectrum -- from low-energy radio waves to high-energy X-rays. However, most active nuclei are believed to be surrounded by a doughnut-shaped region of thick gas and dust that obscures the central regions from certain lines of sight. Both of the active galactic nuclei that NuSTAR recently studied appear to be oriented such that astronomers view them edge-on. That means that instead of seeing the bright central regions, our telescopes primarily see the reflected X-rays from the doughnut-shaped obscuring material. "Just as we can't see the sun on a cloudy day, we can't directly see how bright these active galactic nuclei really are because of all of the gas and dust surrounding the central engine," said Peter Boorman, a graduate student at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. Boorman led the study of an active galaxy called IC 3639, which is 170 million light years away. Researchers analyzed NuSTAR data from this object and compared them with previous observations from NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Japan-led Suzaku satellite. The findings from NuSTAR, which is more sensitive to higher energy X-rays than these observatories, confirm the nature of IC 3639 as an active galactic nucleus. NuSTAR also provided the first precise measurement of how much material is obscuring the central engine of IC 3639, allowing researchers to determine how luminous this hidden monster really is. More surprising is the spiral galaxy that Annuar focused on: NGC 1448. The black hole in its center was only discovered in 2009, even though it is at the center of one of the nearest large galaxies to our Milky Way. By "near," astronomers mean NGC 1448 is only 38 million light years away (one light year is about 6 trillion miles). Annuar's study discovered that this galaxy also has a thick column of gas hiding the central black hole, which could be part of a doughnut-shaped region. X-ray emission from NGC 1448, as seen by NuSTAR and Chandra, suggests for the first time that, as with IC 3639, there must be a thick layer of gas and dust hiding the active black hole in this galaxy from our line of sight. Researchers also found that NGC 1448 has a large population of young (just 5 million year old) stars, suggesting that the galaxy produces new stars at the same time that its black hole feeds on gas and dust. Researchers used the European Southern Observatory New Technology Telescope to image NGC 1448 at optical wavelengths, and identified where exactly in the galaxy the black hole should be. A black hole's location can be hard to pinpoint because the centers of galaxies are crowded with stars. Large optical and radio telescopes can help detect light from around black holes so that astronomers can find their location and piece together the story of their growth. "It is exciting to use the power of NuSTAR to get important, unique information on these beasts, even in our cosmic backyard where they can be studied in detail," said Daniel Stern, NuSTAR project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission led by Caltech and managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. NuSTAR was developed in partnership with the Danish Technical University and the Italian Space Agency (ASI). The spacecraft was built by Orbital Sciences Corp., Dulles, Virginia. NuSTAR's mission operations center is at UC Berkeley, and the official data archive is at NASA's High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center. ASI provides the mission's ground station and a mirror archive. JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA. For more information on NuSTAR, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/nustar http://www.nustar.caltech.edu/

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

 

DAY IN REVIEW The Case of the 'Missing Link' Neutron Star A mysterious neutron star has been caught behaving like two distinct objects -- a radio pulsar and a magnetar -- and could be important to understanding the evolution of these objects. › Read the full story Your Home Planet, as Seen From Mars From the most powerful telescope orbiting Mars comes a new view of Earth and its moon, showing continent-size detail on the planet and the relative size of the moon. › Read the full story

 

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