NASA SDO: Sun Monitoring Satellite captures 100 millionth image

The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured its 100 millionth image of the sun on Jan. 19, 2015. 

The dark areas at the bottom and the top of the image are coronal holes, areas of less dense gas, where solar material has flowed away from the sun. 

Credit: NASA/SDO/AIA/LMSAL

On Jan. 19, 2015, at 12:49 p.m. EST, an instrument on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured its 100 millionth image of the sun.

The instrument is the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA), which uses four telescopes working parallel to gather eight images of the sun, cycling through 10 different wavelengths -- every 12 seconds.

The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) images the solar atmosphere in multiple wavelengths to link changes in the surface to interior changes. 

Data includes images of the Sun in 10 wavelengths every 10 seconds. 

Credit: NASA SDO, Lockheed Martin Solar Astrophysics Laboratory

The Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager extends the capabilities of the SOHO/MDI instrument with continual full-disk coverage at higher spatial resolution and new vector magnetogram capabilities.

Credit: NASA SDO, Lockheed Martin Solar Astrophysics Laboratory

Between the AIA and two other instruments on board, the Helioseismic Magnetic Imager (HMI) and the Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment (EVE), SDO sends down a whopping 1.5 terabytes of data a day.

The Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment measures the solar extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) irradiance with unprecedented spectral resolution, temporal cadence, and precision. 

EVE measures the solar extreme ultraviolet (EUV) spectral irradiance to understand variations on the timescales which influence Earth's climate and near-Earth space.

Credit: NASA SDO, Lockheed Martin Solar Astrophysics Laboratory

AIA is responsible for about half of that. Every day it provides 57,600 detailed images of the sun that show the dance of how solar material sways and sometimes erupts in the solar atmosphere, the corona.

In the almost five years since its launch on Feb. 11, 2010, SDO has provided images of the sun to help scientists better understand how the roiling corona gets to temperatures some 1000 times hotter than the sun's surface, what causes giant eruptions such as solar flares, and why the sun's magnetic fields are constantly on the move.

NASA's NEOWISE captures Comet C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy)

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Comet C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy) is one of more than 32 comets imaged by NASA's NEOWISE mission from December 2013 to December 2014.

This image of comet Lovejoy combines a series of observations made in November 2013, when comet Lovejoy was 1.7 astronomical units from the sun. (An astronomical unit is the distance between Earth and the sun.)

The image spans half of one degree. It shows the comet moving in a mostly west and slightly south direction. (North is 26 degrees to the right of up in the image, and west is 26 degrees downward from directly right.)

The red colour is caused by the strong signal in the NEOWISE 4.6-micron wavelength detector, owing to a combination of gas and dust in the comet's coma.

Comet Lovejoy is the brightest comet in Earth's sky in early 2015. A chart of its location in the sky during dates in January 2015 is at photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA19103 .

NASA Dawn Spacecraft captures new images of CERES craters

The Dawn spacecraft observed Ceres for an hour on Jan. 13, 2015, from a distance of 238,000 miles (383,000 kilometers). 

A little more than half of its surface was observed at a resolution of 27 pixels. 

This animated GIF shows bright and dark features. 

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA/PSI

Latest image from Nasa's Dawn Spacecraft showing the craters on Ceres.

Credit: NASA

NASA's Dawn spacecraft has entered an approach phase in which it will continue to close in on Ceres, a Texas-sized dwarf planet never before visited by a spacecraft.

Dawn launched in 2007 and is scheduled to enter Ceres orbit in March 2015.

Dawn recently emerged from solar conjunction, in which the spacecraft is on the opposite side of the sun, limiting communication with antennas on Earth.

Now that Dawn can reliably communicate with Earth again, mission controllers have programmed the maneuvers necessary for the next stage of the rendezvous, which they label the Ceres approach phase.

Dawn is currently 400,000 miles (640,000 kilometers) from Ceres, approaching it at around 450 miles per hour (725 kilometers per hour).

The spacecraft's arrival at Ceres will mark the first time that a spacecraft has ever orbited two solar system targets.

NASA SDO: Incredible Solar Flare Video Captured

A NASA satellite charged with staring at the sun captured an incredible view of a powerful solar flare on Thursday (Oct. 2).

The space agency's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) caught sight of the flare as it erupted from an active region on the right side of the sun, according to NASA.

The spacecraft' spectacular videos of the solar flare, as well as still images, show the sun storm erupting from the sunspot AR2172-AR2173.

The flare reached its peak at 3:01 p.m. EDT (1901 GMT) on Tuesday. While the M7.3-class flare did cause a coronal mass ejection, an explosion of super-hot solar plasma, the eruption was not directed at Earth, and should not pose a concern for satellites in orbit or the planet as a whole, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Office.

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this photo of an M7.3-class solar flare erupting from the sun on Oct. 2, 2014.

Credit: NASA/SDO

M-class flares are about one-tenth as powerful as the strongest solar flares, which are known as X-class flares.

"Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground. However, when intense enough, they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel," NASA Goddard Space Flight Center spokeswoman Karen Fox wrote in a statement.

The sun has unleashed a series of X-class flares this year. In early September, the star fired off two large flares in rapid succession.

Those solar storms, which were pointed toward Earth, created some amazing aurora displays. Powerful solar tempests can supercharge Earth's auroras, causing curtains of green light to dance in the skies of the high northern and southern latitudes.

The northern lights are created when charged particles from the sun interact with Earth's upper atmosphere, bombarding neutral particles and creating the lights of the auroras.

NASA TRMM Satellite captures Tropical Storm Phanfone fragments

On Sept. 30, the TRMM satellite passed over Tropical Storm Phanfone and saw fragmented bands of thunderstorms with some isolated areas of heavy rain (red) falling at 2 inches per hour. 

Credit: NASA/SSAI, Hal Pierce

The bands of thunderstorms wrapping around Tropical Storm Phanfone in the Northwestern Pacific Ocean appeared fragmented to NASA's TRMM satellite.

On Sept. 30, a typhoon watch remains in effect for the far northern Marianas Islands including Pagan and, extinct volcano, Alamagan.

Tropical storm warnings have been cancelled for Tinian and Saipan, but remain in effect for Pagan, Alamagan and surrounding waters.

A flash flood watch remains in effect for the island of Saipan. For updated forecasts for these islands, visit the U.S. National Weather Service Office's Guam website.

On Sept. 30 at 01:51 UTC (Sept. 29 at 9:51 p.m. EDT) from its orbit in space, NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite passed over Tropical Storm Phanfone.

Most of the rainfall in the fragmented bands of thunderstorms was light to moderate, falling at a rate between 10 and 20 mm (0.39 to 0.79 inch) per hour.

However, TRMM saw some isolated areas of heavy rain falling at 50 mm (2 inches) per hour.

The Joint Typhoon Warning Center noted that animated multi-spectral satellite imagery on Sept. 30 revealed that the tropical storm had slightly unraveled as the bands of thunderstorms had become even more fragmented than they were on Sept. 29.

On Sept. 30 at 1500 UTC (11 a.m. EDT) Phanfone's maximum sustained winds were near 45 knots (83.3 mph/51.7 kph).

It was centered near 17.1 north latitude and 145.0 east longitude, about 103 nautical miles north of Saipan. Phanfone was moving to the west-northwest at 15 knots (17.2 mph/17.7 kph).

Phanfone is forecast to intensify as it moves in a generally northwesterly direction through warm sea surface temperatures, toward the island of Iwo To.

Forecasters at the Joint Typhoon Warning Center expect Phanfone to reach typhoon strength on Oct. 1 and maintain it as it passes west of the island of Iwo To on Oct. 3, later moving toward Japan.

NASA Terra MODIS Image captures Great Lakes in the Fall

A few days after autumn showed up on the calendar in the Northern Hemisphere, it showed up on the landscape of North America. 

Image Credit: Jeff Schmaltz at NASA GSFC. Caption by Mike Carlowicz

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this view of fall colors around the Great Lakes on Sept. 26, 2014.

The changing of leaf colour in temperate forests involves several causes and reactions, but the dominant factors are sunlight and heat.

Since temperatures tend to drop sooner and sunlight fades faster at higher latitudes, the progression of fall colour changes tends to move from north to south across North America from mid-September through mid-November.

In late summer and autumn, tree and plant leaves produce less chlorophyll, the green pigment that harvests sunlight for plants to convert water and carbon dioxide into sugars.

The subsidence of chlorophyll allows other chemical compounds in the leaves, particularly carotenoids and flavonoids, to emerge from the green shadow of summer.

These compounds do not decay as fast as chlorophyll, so they shine through in yellows, oranges, and reds as the green fades.

Another set of chemicals, anthocyanins, are associated with the storage of sugars and give the leaves of some species deep purple and red hues.

ISS crew capture Milky Way from orbit

Image Credit: NASA

One of the Expedition 41 crew members aboard the Earth-orbiting International Space Station on Sept. 13, 2014 captured this image of a starry sky.

The white panel at left belonging to ESA's ATV-5 spacecraft, which is docked with the orbital outpost, obstructs the view of Scorpius.

The red star Antares is directly to the left of the bottom of the second ATV panel from the top.

The two stars that are close together and on the lower left of the photo comprise Shaula, the tip of the scorpion’s tail.

The open cluster close to Shaula is M7. The hardware at bottom right is part of one of the station's solar panels.

M7: Open Star Cluster in Scorpius

Curiosity captures images of Martian clouds

Clouds that are probably composed of ice crystals and possibly supercooled water droplets were caught in images by NASA’s Opportunity rover. 

Credit: NASA/JPL/Texas A&M/Cornell

Curiosity celebrated two years on Mars on August 5, 2014, and is continuing its progress across the surface of the planet.

The rover has already fulfilled one of its primary mission goals by confirming that environments theoretically capable of supporting microbial life were once present on ancient Mars.

Now Curiosity is continuing its journey toward the slopes of Mount Sharp and is currently headed for an outcrop dubbed 'Pahrump Hills.

In a tweet on September 2, 2014, Curiosity shared its view of the path ahead and proclaimed:

"Head for the hills! I'm driving towards these hills on Mars to do geology work & also search for clouds."

Curiosity is described as the first roving analytical laboratory on Mars, and has been cruising around the planet these past two years drilling rocks, zapping soil, and photographing layered outcrops.

The geological data that the mission has returned has been invaluable for astrobiologists trying to interpret Mars' past climate conditions but why is Curiosity also taking time to turn its instruments skyward?

Astrobiology Magazine spoke with Dr. Robert M. Haberle, Planetary Scientist at NASA Ames and a team member for the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS), and asked him why astrobiologists are curious about martian clouds.

"Clouds are part of the planet's climate system," explained Haberle. "Their behaviour tells us about winds and temperatures."

Studying weather and clouds on Mars today can shed light on processes that have shaped the planet's climate through time.

Bob M. Haberle

"Some studies suggest that clouds in the past may have significantly warmed the planet through a greenhouse effect. A warmer environment is more conducive to life," said Haberle.

Clouds are also connected to wind and weather patterns, and studying weather is important for interpreting how natural processes have shaped the rocks, dunes and outcrops that Curiosity has been photographing.

Haberle points out that, "winds are the primary mechanism for shaping the planet's surface for the past 3-4 billion years.

Studying martian weather can not only help us understand Mars' current climate, but also provides clues about its past environment and the physical processes that operate on the planet.

This information can in turn help astrobiologists interpret the planet's geological record.

REMS is an environmental monitoring station composed of six different sensors.

The instrument collects daily and seasonal data on wind, pressure, relative humidity, temperature and ultraviolet radiation at the martian surface.

REMS was contributed to the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission by the the Centro de Astrobiologia (CAB) in Spain.

Spectacular Aurora Borealis captured by ISS Astronauts

NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman captured this view from the International Space Station on Aug. 19, 2014.

Credit: NASA

The northern lights illuminated the night sky near the Arctic Circle earlier this week in a stunning display that could even be appreciated by astronauts living on the International Space Station.

"Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine this," NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman wrote in a Twitter post Tuesday evening (Aug. 19) alongside a photo of the amazing green auroras.

Reid Wiseman, who is a flight engineer, and perhaps Expedition 40's most prolific shutterbug, took pictures of the spectacle as the space station flew past North America around 7:30 p.m. EDT.

Wiseman is not the first to capture images of the Aurora Borealis from the ISS, with film-maker Randy Smith creating a time-lapse film of the light show from aboard the ISS in 2012

NASA Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) to Capture 'Striking' Lightning Data

Flight hardware backups allow NASA to seamlessly continue work in the unlikely event something goes down for a repair.

When projects end, these handy spares can sometimes find second lives in new areas for use.

Researchers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., developed a sophisticated piece of flight hardware called a Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) to detect and locate lightning over the tropical region of the globe.

Launched into space in 1997 as part of NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), the sensor undertook a three-year baseline mission, delivering data used to improve weather forecasts.

It continues to operate successfully aboard the TRMM satellite today.

The team that created this hardware in the mid-1990s built a spare -- and now that second unit is stepping up to contribute, as well.

The sensor is scheduled to launch on a Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station in February 2016.

Once mounted to the station, it will serve a two-year baseline mission as part of a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Space Test Program (STP)-H5 science and technology development payload.

STP-H5 is integrated and flown under the management and direction of the DoD's STP.

NASA selected the LIS spare hardware to fly to the space station in order to take advantage of the orbiting laboratory’s high inclination.

This vantage point gives the sensor the ability to "look" farther towards Earth's poles than the original LIS can aboard the TRMM satellite.

Once installed, the sensor will monitor global lightning for Earth science studies, provide cross-sensor calibration and validation with other space-borne instruments, and ground-based lightning networks.

LIS will also supply real-time lightning data over data-sparse regions, such as oceans, to support operational weather forecasting and warning.

"Only LIS globally detects all in-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning -- what we call total lightning -- during both day and night," said Richard Blakeslee, LIS project scientist at Marshall.

"As previously demonstrated by the TRMM mission, better understanding lightning and its connections to weather and related phenomena can provide unique and affordable gap-filling information to a variety of science disciplines including weather, climate, atmospheric chemistry and lightning physics.”

LIS measures the amount, rate and radiant energy of global lightning, providing storm-scale resolution, millisecond timing, and high, uniform-detection efficiency -- and it does this without land-ocean bias.

Supercomputers capture turbulence in the solar wind

Solar storms unleash bursts of radiation that can reach crew and passengers on commercial flights at certain altitudes and latitudes. 

Eventually the system could be used to log radiation exposure over longer periods of time for pilots and flight crews. 

Credit: NASA

As inhabitants of Earth, our lives are dominated by weather.

Not just in the form of rain and snow from atmospheric clouds, but also a sea of charged particles and magnetic fields generated by a star sitting 93 million miles away—our Sun.

This phenomenon is called solar wind.

When strong magnetic storms occur on the Sun, tons of highly energetic particles are released into the solar wind.

If these particles were free to hit the Earth, the radiation would cause life-threatening damage to our DNA, debilitate power grids, disrupt communications networks and damage electronic devices.

Fortunately for us, the Earth's magnetic dipole field and magnetosphere act as an invisible shield barring these particles from plummeting through the atmosphere.

However, this magnetic shield is not perfect and during particularly intense solar storms the magnetosphere can "crack," allowing charged particles to seep in and wreak havoc on the Earth's technological infrastructure—an event calledspace weather.

Homa Karimabadi

Scientists currently do not have the ability to accurately predict the severity of a space weather event or where it will have the most impact but a team of researchers led by University of California, San Diego's (UCSD's) Homa Karimabadi is hoping to change that.

"One of the challenges in developing accurate predictive forecasts is that the solar wind is turbulent, and the details of turbulence are not well understood," says Karimabadi, who heads the space plasma simulation group at UCSD.

Because turbulence in the solar wind occurs on widely different scales of physics—from planet-size to the sub-atomic—it is especially difficult to study but using supercomputers at the National Institute of Computational Sciences (NICS), Karimabadi and his colleagues managed to simulate all the scales of solar wind turbulence at once—for the first time ever.

Burlen Loring

To make sense of this massive dataset, they tapped Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) Visualization Specialist Burlen Loring, who developed custom analysis tools using supercomputers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC).

Loring's work allows researchers to study turbulence in unprecedented detail, and the results may hold clues about some of the processes that lead to destructive space weather events. This work was published in Physics of Plasmas.

More information: Read the paper: hpcvis.com/PhysPlasmas_20_012303.pdf

ESA ESO La Silla Observatory: Captures Pencil Nebula (NGC 2736) Image

The oddly shaped Pencil Nebula (NGC 2736) is pictured in this image from ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile.

This nebula is a small part of a huge remnant left over after a supernova explosion that took place about 11.000 years ago.

Picture: EPA/European Southern Observatory

Robotic 'Sticky Boom' Lets You Grab Space debris

Robotic arms are commonly used on the space shuttles and on the International Space Station (ISS), mostly for docking purposes.

But it's actually a pretty complicated task for one spacecraft to "grab" another, requiring special fixtures to grasp specific objects. And making repairs to the ISS or to satellites compounds the difficulty.

But now a Colorado-based company has developed a new kind of robotic arm it calls a "sticky boom" that uses electroadhesion to stick to any object by inducing electrostatic charges in the object of interest, whether it be made of plastic, metal, glass, or rock (like, say, an asteroid).

And it doesn't need to be designed especially to grasp a given object. That kind of robust flexibility makes Altius Space Machines' "sticky boom" highly attractive for future space machines.

So, what is this mysterious thing called electroadhesion? It exploits the same difference in charge that gives rise to static electricity.

We experience this every time we drag our feet on the carpet and then touch a conducting surface, or rub a balloon on our hair and then marvel as it magically "sticks" to a wall.

The shuffling (or rubbing) causes our bodies to pick up extra negatively charged electrons, making it "unstable" -- that is, the object is just dying to get rid of its excess negative charge, and thus will be attracted to objects with a positive charge.

With the balloon example, the electrically charged particles are attracted to the more stable particles in the wall, causing it to "stick" to the surface -- at least until enough charged particles transfer to the wall so that the balloon falls to the ground.

The effect is more immediate when we shuffle our feet on the carpet and then touch a metal doorknob. The electrons "jump" across the small gap from our fingers to the knob, and we experience a tiny electric shock.

The electroadhesion technology used in the "sticky boom" is based on work by SRI International to develop wall-climbing robots for military and rescue operations.

Those robots employ a similar unique clamping technology -- a high-tech version of rubbing a balloon on your head to get it to stick to the wall.

Specifically, the robot has a battery power supply connected to pads on the bottom of the robot.

This enables the operator to induce electrostatic charges so that the robot "sticks" to whatever surface it is attempting to manoeuvre across -- even if that surface happens to be a vertical wall covered in dust.

Among other advantages, Altius claims that its sticky boom would enable "just-in-time" supply deliveries to the ISS.

Smaller spacecraft carrying supplies wouldn't need their own docking systems; instead, the ISS crew could reel them in using the sticky boom.

Also, it would be easier to repair the ISS, or nearby satellites.

This capability has implications for the future commercial development of space, particularly when it comes to smaller launch vehicles and "nanosatellites" like the prototype microchip mini-satellites designed by Cornell University's Mason Peck.

Peck's tiny satellites nicknamed "Sprite" and measuring just one square inch launched with Endeavor back in May and are now attached to the international space station.

The chip satellites contain sensors, a microchip, and an antenna to transmit collected data about the chemistry of the solar wind and associated radiation and particle impacts.

Spacecraft outfitted with such a sticky boom could also grasp bits of space debris more easily to clear out our cluttered low-Earth orbit. This is a serious problem.

Earth is now surrounded by so much space junk that a leading expert on the issue has declared that it may soon become too dangerous to venture into low-Earth orbit through fear of having a manned spaceship punctured or a communications satellite trashed.

Altius claims it has already tested successfully a small-scale protype of the sticky boom under simulated space conditions -- namely, a parabolic aircraft flight and within a thermal vacuum chamber -- and has been talking with NASA about implementing the concept on future missions.

DLR Capture Iceberg collides on ice shelf in the Antarctica

Looking like a needle of ice and snow, iceberg B-15K was caught in the act by the German Aerospace Center's (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) TerraSAR-X satellite as it collided with an ice shelf in Atka Bay, Antarctica. Scientists had long been observing as the 54-kilometre long and 5-kilometre wide iceberg was driven around Antarctica by ocean currents. Then, on 11 February 2010, it crashed into the edge of the ice shelf in Atka Bay.



Like a needle of ice and snow, the iceberg B-15K was caught in the act by the German Aerospace Center's (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) TerraSAR-X satellite as it collided with an ice shelf. Scientists had long been watching as the 54-kilometre long and 5-kilometre wide iceberg was being driven around Antarctica by ocean currents. Then, on 11 February 2010, it crashed into the edge of the ice shelf in Atka Bay.

The Neumayer station, visible as a bright spot in this TerraSAR-X image, was not affected by the collision. This image, taken on 10 February 2008, shows the station as well as the transport routes to the ice shelf.

To read the full article on the DLR website, click here

Capture a Rainbow in a Glass Lens

The rainbow trap is a gilded 4.5-millimetre-wide lens perched atop a gold-coated glass slide (Image: Vera Smolyaninova/Towson University, Baltimore, Maryland)

Oh, to catch a rainbow. Well, it's been done for the first time ever – and with just a simple lens and a plate of glass at that.

The technique could be used to store information using light, a boon for optical computing and telecommunications.

All-optical computing devices promise to be faster and more efficient than current technology, but they suffer from the drawback that signals have to be converted back and forth from optical to electrical. The ability to "slow" light to a crawl or even trap it helps, as information in the light can then be manipulated directly.

In 2007, Ortwin Hess of the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK, and colleagues proposed a technique to trap light inside a tapering waveguide, which is a structure that guides light waves down its length. The waveguide in question would use metamaterials – exotic materials that can bend light sharply.

The idea is that as the waveguide tapers, the components of the light are made to stop in turn at ever narrower points. That's because any given component of the light cannot pass through an opening that's smaller than its wavelength. This leads to a "trapped rainbow".

Gilded waveguide
While numerical models showed that such waveguides would work in theory, making them out of metamaterials remained a distant dream. Now Vera Smolyaninova of Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland, and colleagues have used a convex lens to create the tapered waveguide and trap a rainbow of light.

They coated one side of a 4.5-millimetre-diameter lens with a gold film 30 nanometre thick, and laid the lens – gold-side down – on a flat glass slide which was also coated with film of gold. Viewed side-on, the space between the curved lens and the flat slide was a layer of air that narrowed to zero thickness where the lens touched the slide – essentially a tapered waveguide.

When they shone a multi-wavelength laser beam at the open end of the gilded waveguide, a trapped rainbow formed inside. This could be seen as a series of coloured rings when the lens was viewed from above with a microscope: the visible light leaked through the thin gold film.