True story: NASA technology saves Claus from a disaster at sea! Christmas (and the sport of fishing) may never be the same.

Here is a good example of how data coming from space (close to earth) could help the average person.

Dec. 24, 2008: Last year, a certain Mr. Claus got a very nice gift.

Terry Claus, captain of a 53-foot charter boat called The Qualifier, received something that helped him avoid a disaster at sea–namely, data transmitted onto his GPS screen. If “data” isn’t your idea of a Christmas gift, just listen:

“One night, my wife, children, and I were fishing for swordfish 25 miles off the Miami coast,” says Claus. “We saw black clouds to the west. That’s not unusual where we live. Florida storms sometimes build over land and then dissipate. But that night, when I checked the radar on my GPS, I saw an incredible line of severe thunderstorms moving towards us — and fast.”

“I checked the lightning strike screen, and it looked like a chained link fence of continuous lightning,” he continues. “I shouted, ‘Reel in the lines! We have to get out of here fast!’ I could see on the screen where the cloud mass was weakest, so I followed that route. A 747 jet flew overhead and seemed to be following the same route we were following. We must have been looking at the same data! We made it to port safely.”

The Short-term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) project at the Marshall Space Flight Center “facilitates the transfer and use of unique NASA satellite data to improve short-term weather forecasts, and disseminates unique weather products like those that helped make Claus’s bird’s eye view of the weather possible that night,” says Dr. Gary Jedlovec, satellite meteorologist and SPoRT principal investigator.

Source: Nasa Science – click here for full article

The planet Saturn is doing something rare and beautiful this holiday season. Find out what in today’s story from Science@NASA.

Dec. 22, 2008: You look through the telescope. Blink. Shake your head and look again. The planet you expected to see in the eyepiece is not the one that’s actually there. Too much eggnog?

No, it’s just Saturn’s crazy Christmas tilt.

All year long, the rings of Saturn have been tilting toward Earth and now they are almost perfectly edge-on. The opening angle is a paper-thin 0.8o. Viewed from the side, the normally wide and bright rings have become a shadowy line bisecting Saturn’s two hemispheres–a scene of rare beauty.

Source: Nasa Science – click here for full article

Solar flares are supposed to obliterate everything in their vicinity, yet one of the most powerful flares of the past 30 years has done just the opposite, emitting a beam of pure and unbroken hydrogen atoms. Researchers think this strange event could yield vital clues to the inner workings of solar flares.

Dec. 15, 2008: Solar flares are the most powerful explosions in the solar system. Packing a punch equal to a hundred million hydrogen bombs, they obliterate everything in their immediate vicinity. Not a single atom should remain intact.

At least that’s how it’s supposed to work.

“We’ve detected a stream of perfectly intact hydrogen atoms shooting out of an X-class solar flare,” says Richard Mewaldt of Caltech. “What a surprise! These atoms could be telling us something new about what happens inside flares.”

The event occurred on Dec. 5, 2006. A large sunspot rounded the sun’s eastern limb and with little warning it exploded. On the “Richter scale” of flares, which ranks X1 as a big event, the blast registered X9, making it one of the strongest flares of the past 30 years…

Source: Nasa Science – click here for full article