Three NASA Missions Return 1st-Light Data

NASA’s continued quest to explore our solar system and beyond received a boost of new information this week with three key missions proving not only that they are up and running, but that their science potential is exceptional. On Sept. 17, 2018, TESS — the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite — shared its first science observations. Later in the week, the latest two missions to join NASA’s heliophysics fleet returned first light data: Parker Solar Probe, humanity’s first mission to “touch” the Sun, and GOLD, a mission that studies the dynamic boundary between Earth and space.

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Credits: NASA/Naval Research Laboratory/Parker Solar Probe

These are the first images from WISPR, short for the Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe. Researchers studied the images to determine the instrument was pointed as expected, using celestial landmarks as their guide. The left image shows the Milky Way, looking at the galactic center.

In the right image, there is a distinctive cluster of four stars near the right edge that is in the constellation Scorpius. The planet Jupiter is also visible in the right image as the bright object slightly right of center. The Sun, not visible in the image, is far off to the right of the image’s right edge

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Credits: NASA/LASP/GOLD

First light data from GOLD was captured at 6 a.m. local time, near sunrise in eastern South America, and shows the ultraviolet atomic oxygen emission from Earth’s upper atmosphere.

Colors correspond to emission brightness, with the strongest in red and the weakest in blue. The emission is produced at altitudes around 100 miles above the surface (note how it extends above Earth’s surface on the horizon), when Earth’s upper atmosphere absorbs high energy photons and particles.

The aurora, at the top and bottom of the image, and daytime airglow, on the right-hand side, are also visible. An ultraviolet star, 66 Ophiuchi, is visible above the western horizon of Earth


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NASA's planet-hunting TESS mission shares '1st-light' image