Stellary Starry Universe

 

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

NASA’s five THEMIS spacecraft have discovered a breach in Earth’s magnetic field ten times larger than anything previously thought to exist. The size of the opening and the strange way it forms could overturn long-held ideas of space physics.

“At first I didn’t believe it,” says THEMIS project scientist David Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “This finding fundamentally alters our understanding of the solar wind-magnetosphere interaction.”

The magnetosphere is a bubble of magnetism that surrounds Earth and protects us from solar wind. Exploring the bubble is a key goal of the THEMIS mission, launched in February 2007. The big discovery came on June 3, 2007, when the five probes serendipitously flew through the breach just as it was opening. Onboard sensors recorded a torrent of solar wind particles streaming into the magnetosphere, signaling an event of unexpected size and importance.

“The opening was huge—four times wider than Earth itself,” says Wenhui Li, a space physicist at the University of New Hampshire who has been analyzing the data. Li’s colleague Jimmy Raeder, also of New Hampshire, says “1027 particles per second were flowing into the magnetosphere—that’s a 1 followed by 27 zeros. This kind of influx is an order of magnitude greater than what we thought was possible.”

Source: Nasa Science – click here for full article

From humble beginnings in a Utah beryllium mine to the most advanced laboratories in the world, the mirrors of NASA’s next great observatory are taking an incredible journey to space.

December 10, 2008: The James Webb Space Telescope, targeted for launch in 2013, is already taking an incredible journey right here on Earth. It’s zigzagging up, down, and across the US to be “spit and polished” to perfection for its lofty space mission.

“To find the first stars and galaxies that formed in the early universe, which are millions and even billions of light years away, the Webb telescope mirror has to be wickedly smooth,” says Jeff Kegley of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

To get ready for space, the 18 mirror segments that will ultimately form the Webb telescope’s huge primary mirror are trucked from pit stop to pit stop in tandem cross-country for careful processing and polishing. They visit seven different states, some several times.

During the long odyssey, every precaution is taken for their protection. How many years of bad luck would you have if you broke one of these mirrors?

“That’s something we don’t talk about,” laughs Helen Cole, also of Marshall. “But seriously, we do have three spare segments, so no problem there.”

Let’s trace a mirror segment’s Earthly journey from rough start to “wickedly smooth,” and finally to union with its 17 siblings to form a 6.5 meter (21 ½ foot) wide whole with a total area of 25 square-meters (almost 30 square yards).

Source: Nasa Science – click here for full article