A Little Bit History… And An Exciting Future. #saturnv #sls #spacelaunchsystem #nasa #nasaartemis #solarsystemambassador

Started the year off with an invitation from NASA to visit Marshall Space Flight Center. Hopefully, I’m about to get another piece of good news from them to start the new year. https://www.instagram.com/p/CJfWGB3js7_/?igshid=jl1ram2zbctu

My published Mission Juno image…

Navigating Deep Space by Starlight

On August 6, 1967, astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell noticed a blip in her radio telescope data. And then another. Eventually, Bell Burnell figured out that these blips, or pulses, were not from people or machines.

The blips were constant. There was something in space that was pulsing in a regular pattern, and Bell Burnell figured out that it was a pulsar: a rapidly spinning neutron star emitting beams of light. Neutron stars are superdense objects created when a massive star dies. Not only are they dense, but neutron stars can also spin really fast! Every star we observe spins, and due to a property called angular momentum, as a collapsing star gets smaller and denser, it spins faster. It’s like how ice skaters spin faster as they bring their arms closer to their bodies and make the space that they take up smaller.

The pulses of light coming from these whirling stars are like the beacons spinning at the tops of lighthouses that help sailors safely approach the shore. As the pulsar spins, beams of radio waves (and other types of light) are swept out into the universe with each turn. The light appears and disappears from our view each time the star rotates.

After decades of studying pulsars, astronomers wondered—could they serve as cosmic beacons to help future space explorers navigate the universe? To see if it could work, scientists needed to do some testing!

First, it was important to gather more data. NASA’s NICER, or Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer, is a telescope that was installed aboard the International Space Station in 2017. Its goal is to find out things about neutron stars like their sizes and densities, using an array of 56 special X-ray concentrators and sensitive detectors to capture and measure pulsars’ light.

But how can we use these X-ray pulses as navigational tools? Enter SEXTANT, or Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology. If NICER was your phone, SEXTANT would be like an app on it.  

During the first few years of NICER’s observations, SEXTANT created an on-board navigation system using NICER’s pulsar data. It worked by measuring the consistent timing between each pulsar’s pulses to map a set of cosmic beacons.

When calculating position or location, extremely accurate timekeeping is essential. We usually rely on atomic clocks, which use the predictable fluctuations of atoms to tick away the seconds. These atomic clocks can be located on the ground or in space, like the ones on GPS satellites. However, our GPS system only works on or close to Earth, and onboard atomic clocks can be expensive and heavy. Using pulsar observations instead could give us free and reliable “clocks” for navigation. During its experiment, SEXTANT was able to successfully determine the space station’s orbital position!

We can calculate distances using the time taken for a signal to travel between two objects to determine a spacecraft’s approximate location relative to those objects. However, we would need to observe more pulsars to pinpoint a more exact location of a spacecraft. As SEXTANT gathered signals from multiple pulsars, it could more accurately derive its position in space.

So, imagine you are an astronaut on a lengthy journey to the outer solar system. You could use the technology developed by SEXTANT to help plot your course. Since pulsars are reliable and consistent in their spins, you wouldn’t need Wi-Fi or cell service to figure out where you were in relation to your destination. The pulsar-based navigation data could even help you figure out your ETA!

None of these missions or experiments would be possible without Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s keen eye for an odd spot in her radio data decades ago, which set the stage for the idea to use spinning neutron stars as a celestial GPS. Her contribution to the field of astrophysics laid the groundwork for research benefitting the people of the future, who yearn to sail amongst the stars.  

Keep up with the latest NICER news by following NASA Universe on X and Facebook and check out the mission’s website. For more on space navigation, follow @NASASCaN on X or visit NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation website.  

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

Another Side Project...

John’s Side Project #248 - Tagging NASA footage for the National Archives.

If you know anything about anything, volunteer for the National Archives and Records Administration. They need people to do the things computers can’t... Things such as transcription, identification of things and places, and tagging films that have been digitized. For example, they have a collection of photos from World War I. These photos often have handwritten captions or locations that a computer can’t make out. It takes people to examine the captions and transcribe them for searching.

For my current project, NASA has thousands of hours of footage from tests and missions that need to be tagged in order to be searchable. This is where my insomnia is put to good use.

Behind the scenes documentary about the Voyager probes.

Saturday night viewing.

In honor of the anniversary of the Apollo 12 Moon landing, here is one of my images I reprocessed. (Celestron 127slt mak, iPhone 8) #space #apollo #apollo12 #apollo50th #moon #astronomy #nasa https://www.instagram.com/p/B5CEVqrHS6L/?igshid=byug01nzfwhx

Playing with false color to bring out detail. . . . . #celestron127slt #celestrontelescope #solarsystemambassador #backyardastronomy #moon https://www.instagram.com/p/CSnu-exs0kp/?utm_medium=tumblr

Just found out my GOES-16 (formerly GOES-R) certifications qualify me for projects on GOES-S! My “midlife crisis” hobby is really starting to “blast off”. 😏🌎🛰

An American Heritage Girls troop invited me to come speak about astronomy and women in STEM / Space Science. The girls had amazing questions and I got to be dramatic in my teaching. #astronomy #nasa #stem #stemgirls #solarsytemambassador #americanheritagegirls https://www.instagram.com/p/CZN4_eHsAjJ/?utm_medium=tumblr