Visit http://science.nasa.gov/ for breaking science news.
As Voyager 1 recedes from the solar system, researchers are listening for "interstellar music" (a.k.a. plasma waves) to learn more about conditions outside the heliosphere.
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As Voyager 1 recedes from the solar system, researchers are hoping the spacecraft will beam back tones from plasma waves, a form of "interstellar music" that reveals conditions in the realm of the stars. Find out what deep space sounds like in a new video from Science@NASA. www.spaceweather.com ScienceCasts: The Sounds of Interstellar Space Published on 31 Oct 2013
Visit http://science.nasa.gov/ for breaking science news. As Voyager 1 recedes from the solar system, researchers are listening for "interstellar music" (a.k.a. plasma waves) to learn more about conditions outside the heliosphere.
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From the highest volcano to the deepest canyon: Amazing video uses space probe's 12,500 orbits to reveal the beauty of Mars
Trenches 23,000 feet deep, psychedelic spirals of lava and the highest known mountain in the solar system - these are just some of the highlights seen by the Mars Express spacecraft over the past decade.
Mars Express, launched in 2003, has now orbited the planet nearly 12,500 times, providing scientists with unprecedented images and data collected by its range of scientific instruments. The data have been used to create an almost global digital topographic model of Mars' surface, providing a unique flyby video. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2480151/From-highest-volcano-deepest-canyon-Amazing-video-uses-space-probes-12-500-orbits-reveal-beauty-Mars.html#ixzz2jDaKwHIb Asteroid Fear: Gaia Satellite sent into Space to monitor blind zone between Sun and Earth23/10/2013 Emily Fox. The Express, UK : Sun, 20 Oct 2013 13:44 CDT A state of the art satellite is being sent into space to monitor the blind zone between the Earth and the sun to warn of incoming asteroids. Astronomers have previously not been able to spot asteroids in the 'blind zone' due to radiation from the sun blocking information. But now The European Space Agency intends to launch the Gaia Space Telescope with its key task being to monitor the area between the Earth and the sun and warn of any impending collisions. One recent asteroid which could have been spotted as it travelled through the 'blind zone' months before it collided with the Earth, was that of the Russian asteroid of February this year which caused a spectacular fireball before smashing into Chelyabinsk, 900 miles east of Russia. Gerry Gilmore, professor of experimental philosophy at Cambridge University's Institute of Astronomy told the Sunday Times: "Gaia will measure all the asteroids including those between us and the sun which are the really nasty ones because we can't see them." During its five-year-mission the £800 million Gaia will also map the stars with unprecedented precision - giving astronomers the first accurate 3D map of our galaxy and measure distance between the stars. A spokseman for the ESA said: "During its anticipated lifetime of five years, Gaia will observe each of its 1billion sources about 70 times, resulting in a record of the brightness and position of each source over time. "Together with the unprecedented accuracy of the astrometric measurements, this will lead to the discovery of planets around other stars, asteroids in our Solar System, icy bodies in the outer Solar System, brown dwarfs, and far-distant supernovae and quasars. The list of Gaia's potential discoveries makes the mission unique in scope and scientific return." The satellite completed final preparations in Europe last year and will take off from a launch site in French Guiana on November 20. http://www.sott.net/article/267825-Asteroid-fear-Gaia-satellite-sent-into-space-to-monitor-blind-zone-between-sun-and-Earth Sid Perkins, ScienceShot : Tue, 22 Oct 2013 17:45 CDT Stars in our part of the Milky Way seem to be doing "the wave," a new study suggests. The finding comes from an analysis of the motions of more than 70,000 red giant stars that lie within 6500 light-years of Earth - a distance that, in one direction, reaches about one-fourth of the way to the center of the galaxy. Above the horizontal plane that slices through the center of the galaxy, stars closer to the center of the galaxy than the sun are, in general, moving away from the plane at speeds of 10 kilometers per second or less. Meanwhile, those farther from the galactic center than the sun are moving toward the plane - in some cases, as fast as 17 kilometers per second. Altogether, the complexity of motions observed by the team is similar to that seen among molecules in a gas with a sound wave passing through it, the researchers report this month in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. As of yet, the reasons for these anomalous motions aren't clear, the researchers note. The "wave" may indeed be a ripple caused by a long-ago collision with a small companion galaxy, or it may result from perturbations in pressure triggered as the Milky Way's spiral arms push their way through space as the galaxy rotates. http://www.sott.net/article/267895-The-Milky-Way-does-the-Wave NEW: Every night, a network of NASA all-sky cameras scans the skies above the United States for meteoritic fireballs. Automated software maintained by NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office calculates their orbits, velocity, penetration depth in Earth's atmosphere and many other characteristics. Daily results are presented here on Spaceweather.com. On Oct. 21, 2013, the network reported 34 fireballs. (15 Orionids, 13 sporadics, 4 Leonis Minorids, 2 epsilon Geminids) In this diagram of the inner solar system, all of the fireball orbits intersect at a single point--Earth. The orbits are color-coded by velocity, from slow (red) to fast (blue). [Larger image] [movies] www.spaceweather.com
Here's some news you might not hear from NASA because, like much of the US government, the space agency is closed. NASA's Juno spacecraft will slingshot past Earth on October 9th for a velocity boost en route to Jupiter. At closest approach the spacecraft will be only 347 miles from Earth as it gains an extra 16,000 mph for the long journey ahead. Originally, the Juno mission team was planning to activate Juno’s instruments and practice gathering data during the flyby. Will that still happen? Stay tuned for updates. Update: During the flyby, Juno's science instruments will sample the Earth environment--a practice run for data-taking at Jupiter years from now. Fortunately, commands to activate Juno's sensors were uploaded before the shutdown. The science experiment can proceed. Radio amateurs are encouraged to beam a message to Juno during the flyby. Juno will be listening. www.spaceweather.com Published on 30 Sep 2013 by 'Suspicious Observers'
http://www.suspicious0bservers.org/pr... Counterstrike Ch1 Posted : Counterstrike Ch2 Due November 1 Starwater Ch1 Posted : Starwater Ch2 Due October 1 They want to blame you : http://youtu.be/l-RvUedfKpk Evening News: 96% Daily Upload Rate : Private Forum: Online, Troll-Free : Fly on the Wall: 13 hrs total Original music by NEMES1S : http://www.suspicious0bservers.org/shop/ : http://www.soundclick.com/nemes1s Background: How to Watch the Sun: Spaceweather 101 - http://youtu.be/ld5ecZuHECA Ice Age Soon? http://youtu.be/UuYTcnN7TQk An Unlikely but Relevant Risk - The Solar Killshot: http://youtu.be/X0KJ_dxp170 REPEAT LINKS: WORLD WEATHER: NDBC Buoys: http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/ Tropical Storms: http://www.wunderground.com/tropical/ HurricaneZone Satellite Images: http://www.hurricanezone.net/westpaci... Weather Channel: http://www.weather.com/ NOAA Environmental Visualization Laboratory: http://www.nnvl.noaa.gov/Default.php Pressure Maps: http://www.woweather.com/cgi-bin/expe... Satellite Maps: http://www.woweather.com/cgi-app/sate... Forecast Maps: http://www.woweather.com/weather/maps... EL DORADO WORLD WEATHER MAP: http://www.eldoradocountyweather.com/... TORCON: http://www.weather.com/news/tornado-t... [Tornado Forecast for the day] HURRICANE TRACKER: http://www.weather.com/weather/hurric... US WEATHER: Precipitation Totals: http://www.cocorahs.org/ViewData/List... GOES Satellites: http://rsd.gsfc.nasa.gov/goes/ THE WINDMAP: http://hint.fm/wind/ Severe Weather Threats: http://www.weather.com/news/weather-s... Canada Weather Office Satellite Composites: http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/satell... Temperature Delta: http://www.intellicast.com/National/T... Records/Extremes: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/rec... SPACEWEATHER: Spaceweather: http://spaceweather.com SOHO Solar Wind: http://umtof.umd.edu/pm/ HAARP Data Meters: http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/haarp/dat... Planetary Orbital Diagram - Ceres1 JPL: http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr... SDO: http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/ Helioviewer: http://www.helioviewer.org/ SOHO: http://sohodata.nascom.nasa.gov/cgi-b... Stereo: http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/i... SOLARIMG: http://solarimg.org/artis/ iSWA: http://iswa.gsfc.nasa.gov/iswa/iSWA.html NASA ENLIL SPIRAL: http://iswa.gsfc.nasa.gov:8080/IswaSy... NOAA ENLIL SPIRAL: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/wsa-enlil/ GOES Xray: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/sxi/goes15/i... Gamma Ray Bursts: http://grb.sonoma.edu/ BARTOL Cosmic Rays: http://neutronm.bartol.udel.edu//spac... ISWA: http://iswa.ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov:8080/I... NOAA Sunspot Classifications: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/lates... GONG: http://gong2.nso.edu/dailyimages/ GONG Magnetic Maps: http://gong.nso.edu/data/magmap/ondem... MISC Links: JAPAN Radiation Map: http://jciv.iidj.net/map/ RADIATION Network: http://radiationnetwork.com/ LISS: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/monitoring... QUAKES LIST FULL: http://www.emsc-csem.org/Earthquake/s... RSOE: http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/index2.php [That cool alert map I use] Moon: http://www.fourmilab.ch/earthview/pac... Sept. 12, 2013: NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft officially is the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space. The 36-year-old probe is about 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) from our sun. New and unexpected data indicate Voyager 1 has been traveling for about one year through plasma, or ionized gas, present in the space between stars. Voyager is in a transitional region immediately outside the solar bubble, where some effects from our sun are still evident. A report on the analysis of this new data, an effort led by Don Gurnett and the plasma wave science team at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, is published in Thursday's edition of the journal Science. A new NASA video describes how Voyager 1 crossed the threshold into Interstellar Space. "Now that we have new key data, we believe this is mankind's historic leap into interstellar space," said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. "The Voyager team needed time to analyze those observations and make sense of them. But we can now answer the question we've all been asking -- 'Are we there yet?' Yes, we are."
Voyager 1 first detected the increased pressure of interstellar space on the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles surrounding the sun that reaches far beyond the outer planets, in 2004. Scientists then ramped up their search for evidence of the spacecraft's interstellar arrival, knowing the data analysis and interpretation could take months or years. Voyager 1 does not have a working plasma sensor, so scientists needed a different way to measure the spacecraft's plasma environment to make a definitive determination of its location. A coronal mass ejection, or a massive burst of solar wind and magnetic fields, that erupted from the sun in March 2012 provided scientists the data they needed. When this unexpected gift from the sun eventually arrived at Voyager 1's location 13 months later, in April 2013, the plasma around the spacecraft began to vibrate like a violin string. On April 9, Voyager 1's plasma wave instrument detected the movement. The pitch of the oscillations helped scientists determine the density of the plasma. The particular oscillations meant the spacecraft was bathed in plasma more than 40 times denser than what they had encountered in the outer layer of the heliosphere. Density of this sort is to be expected in interstellar space. The plasma wave science team reviewed its data and found an earlier, fainter set of oscillations in October and November 2012. Through extrapolation of measured plasma densities from both events, the team determined Voyager 1 first entered interstellar space in August 2012. You can read the rest of the story at : http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/12sep_voyager1/ Published on 15 Dec 2012
From "Thrive: What on Earth Will it Take?" To see full movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEV5AF... Featured: Nassim Haramein, Steven Greer, Duane Elgin, Adam Trombley, Nikola Tesla, James Gilliland, Jack Kasher. UPDATE 17/08/2013: BRIGHT NOVA: Nova Delphini, which exploded just three days ago in the northern constellation Delphinus, has continued to brighten. With a magnitude of +4.5, it is now easily visible in binoculars even from urban areas if you know where to look. This cactus in Tucson, Arizona, points the way: "This is my obligatory southern-Arizona cactus photo of the nova in Delphinus," says photographer Scott Tucker. "It was actually visible to the naked eye at the time." Novas occur in binary star systems when one star dumps matter onto a companion white dwarf. As the matter piles up on the surface of the white dwarf it heats up, fuses, and explodes, producing a flash of light 50,000 to 100,000 times brighter than the sun. Despite their brightness, most novas are invisible to the unaided eye because they are so far away. Nova Delphini is a rare exception. A NEW STAR IN THE SKY : 16/08/2013 : Around the world, amateur astronomers are turning their telescopes toward minor constellation Delphinus where a new star has appeared. Koichi Itagaki of Yamagata, Japan, discovered the nova on August 14th. At the time, the stellar brightness was +6.3. Since then it has continued to brighten, crossing the 6th magnitude threshold of naked-eye visibility. John Chumack photographed the surging nova on August 15th from the John Bryan State Park in Yellow Springs, Ohio: "The nova is hard to see naked eye unless you are in a very dark sky and know exactly where to look," says Chumack, "but this is a very bright nova visible in binoculars." He used a 16-inch Newtonian telescope to take the picture.
Backyard astronomers who wish to see this nova should point their GOTO telescopes to coordinates 20:23:30.7, +20:46:06 (J2000). More information and updates are available from Sky and Telescope. www.spaceweather.com The Perseid meteor shower is intensifying as Earth moves deeper into the debris stream of parent comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle. International observers are reporting as many as 50 Perseids per hour from dark sky sites, a rate which could double on August 12-13 when the shower peaks. The best time to look is during the dark hours between local midnight and sunrise. "We have recorded dozens of Perseid fireballs in the past few nights," says Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. "And we haven't even reached the peak...." Cooke has plotted the orbits of all the recent Perseid fireballs, color-coded green in this diagram of the inner solar system: The purple orbit traces the path of the parent comet, 109P/Swift-Tuttle. It nicely matches the orbits of the Perseids. Earth is marked by a blue dot where all the curves intersect. This diagram is going to get busier in the nights ahead, so stay tuned.
www.spaceweather.com August 6, 2013 – SPACE – The Jupiter-sized world, dubbed GJ 504b, was found much further out in its star’s orbit than a planet its size should have been, if you go by existing planet-formation theory. GJ 504b weighs in at around four times Jupiter’s mass, and is the lowest mass exoplanet to be imaged orbiting a Sun-like star using direct imaging techniques. Given its similarity to Jupiter’s size, NASA boffins were surprised to find that it was much further away than Jupiter is in the solar system’s setup: nearly nine times as far, to be exact. According to existing theory, planets of this size are formed in the gas-rich debris field around a young star. Collisions between asteroids and comets in the disk around the star provide a core seed, which pulls in gas to form a planet when the core reaches sufficient mass to have gravity. But this model – called “core-accretion” theory – only works well for worlds out as far as Neptune in our solar system, around 30 times further out than the Earth, and not so well once the world is even more distant from its star. “This is among the hardest planets to explain in a traditional planet-formation framework,” said team member Markus Janson, a Hubble postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University. “Its discovery implies that we need to seriously consider alternative formation theories, or perhaps to reassess some of the basic assumptions in the core-accretion theory.” The team spotted GJ 504 by using direct imaging techniques with infrared data from the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. Direct imaging gives researchers lots of data about exoplanets, but is arguably one of the hardest techniques to manage. “Imaging provides information about the planet’s luminosity, temperature, atmosphere and orbit, but because planets are so faint and so close to their host stars, it’s like trying to take a picture of a firefly near a searchlight,” explained Masayuki Kuzuhara at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, who led the discovery team. GJ 504b orbits the G0-type star GJ 504, which is slightly hotter than our Sun and faintly visible to the naked eye in the constellation Virgo, 57 light years away. The team estimates that the system is around 160 million years old, with the star at just one-thirtieth its age, compared to the Sun, which is around halfway through its energy-producing life. “If we could travel to this giant planet, we would see a world still glowing from the heat of its formation with a colour reminiscent of a dark cherry blossom, a dull magenta,” said Michael McElwain, a member of the discovery team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre. –The Register UK http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2013/08/06/giant-magenta-planets-existence-exposes-more-holes-in-planet-formation-theory/ August 5, 2013: Something big is about to happen on the sun. According to measurements from NASA-supported observatories, the sun's vast magnetic field is about to flip. "It looks like we're no more than 3 to 4 months away from a complete field reversal," says solar physicist Todd Hoeksema of Stanford University. "This change will have ripple effects throughout the solar system." The sun's magnetic field changes polarity approximately every 11 years. It happens at the peak of each solar cycle as the sun's inner magnetic dynamo re-organizes itself. The coming reversal will mark the midpoint of Solar Cycle 24. Half of 'Solar Max' will be behind us, with half yet to come. Astronomers at the Wilcox Solar Observatory (WSO) monitor the sun's global magnetic field on a daily basis. Hoeksema is the director of Stanford's Wilcox Solar Observatory, one of the few observatories in the world that monitor the sun's polar magnetic fields. The poles are a herald of change. Just as Earth scientists watch our planet's polar regions for signs of climate change, solar physicists do the same thing for the sun. Magnetograms at Wilcox have been tracking the sun's polar magnetism since 1976, and they have recorded three grand reversals—with a fourth in the offing. Astronomers at the Wilcox Solar Observatory (WSO) monitor the sun's global magnetic field on a daily basis. WSO home page Solar physicist Phil Scherrer, also at Stanford, describes what happens: "The sun's polar magnetic fields weaken, go to zero, and then emerge again with the opposite polarity. This is a regular part of the solar cycle." A reversal of the sun's magnetic field is, literally, a big event. The domain of the sun's magnetic influence (also known as the "heliosphere") extends billions of kilometers beyond Pluto. Changes to the field's polarity ripple all the way out to the Voyager probes, on the doorstep of interstellar space. When solar physicists talk about solar field reversals, their conversation often centers on the "current sheet." The current sheet is a sprawling surface jutting outward from the sun's equator where the sun's slowly-rotating magnetic field induces an electrical current. The current itself is small, only one ten-billionth of an amp per square meter (0.0000000001 amps/m2), but there’s a lot of it: the amperage flows through a region 10,000 km thick and billions of kilometers wide. Electrically speaking, the entire heliosphere is organized around this enormous sheet. During field reversals, the current sheet becomes very wavy. Scherrer likens the undulations to the seams on a baseball. As Earth orbits the sun, we dip in and out of the current sheet. Transitions from one side to another can stir up stormy space weather around our planet. An artist's concept of the heliospheric current sheet, which becomes more wavy when the sun's magnetic field flips. More Cosmic rays are also affected. These are high-energy particles accelerated to nearly light speed by supernova explosions and other violent events in the galaxy. Cosmic rays are a danger to astronauts and space probes, and some researchers say they might affect the cloudiness and climate of Earth. The current sheet acts as a barrier to cosmic rays, deflecting them as they attempt to penetrate the inner solar system. A wavy, crinkly sheet acts as a better shield against these energetic particles from deep space. As the field reversal approaches, data from Wilcox show that the sun's two hemispheres are out of synch. "The sun's north pole has already changed sign, while the south pole is racing to catch up," says Scherrer. "Soon, however, both poles will be reversed, and the second half of Solar Max will be underway." When that happens, Hoeksema and Scherrer will share the news with their colleagues and the public. Stay tuned to Science@NASA for updates. Credits: Author:Dr. Tony Phillips| Production editor: Dr. Tony Phillips | Credit: Science@NASA More information: Is Solar Max Double-Peaked? -- ScienceCast video August 3, 2013 – SPACE - Colombian scientists have discovered what may be a graveyard of comets in a very strange spot — and now, some of the interred are coming back to life. These so-called “Lazarus” comets, described in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, may represent a long-lost population of the icy space travelers and may alter scientists’ understanding of their origins. These chunks of ice and rock, typically a few kilometers across, have long held human imaginations as “falling stars.” As a comet travels around the sun, the heat and light vaporize some of the water ice trapped inside, causing the signature tail of glowing gas and dust to form behind it. They’re thought to have started out near the fringes of the planetary system, with stretched, elliptical orbits that are so extreme that some of comets circle the sun only once in several thousand years. Others have quicker round-trips of a couple of centuries or so; these so-called short-period comets are the source of such famous sightings as Halley’s Comet. But in recent years, astronomers started to pick up strange, comet-like bodies popping up where they hadn’t expected them — in the main belt, the wide ring of asteroids that sits between Mars and Jupiter. The surprising property of these objects is that their orbits are entirely asteroidal while their behavior is entirely cometary,” the researchers wrote. That’s surprising, because comets aren’t supposed to be there, right in the middle of the planetary lineup. The main belt is filled with rocky debris from several feet to hundreds of miles long. These asteroids could have been the building blocks of another planet, had Jupiter’s gravity not kept the fragments apart. What were comets, thought to originate on the fringes of our solar neighborhood, doing there? According to researchers from the University of Antioquia in Colombia, there may have been a sizable population of comets in the main belt in the past that had long since “died,” their icy reserves nearly expended by heat and light from the sun. Some of these comets, however, were merely dormant, the researchers found, and if their orbits were nudged just slightly closer to the sun’s warming rays, it could release ice trapped deep within the comets, bringing them back to life. “Thus, we propose that the asteroidal belt contains an enormous graveyard of ancient dormant and extinct rocky comets, that turn on [are rejuvenated], in response to a diminution of their perihelion distance, caused by planetary perturbations.” A dozen such Lazarus comets were picked up among the asteroids over the past decade, and it’s quite possible there are many more out there, the researchers said. –LA Times Planetary Break-up: “In 1978, I proposed a new theory that comets originated in the energetic breakup of a body orbiting the Sun in or near the present location of the asteroid belt in the relatively recent past…if comets did originate in a break-up event in the inner solar system, then the original distances of closest approach to the Sun for their orbits must all have been less than or equal to the distance at which the break-up occurred …. Astronomer Oort always maintained that an origin of comets from within the solar system, perhaps in connection with the event which gave rise to the asteroid belt, was the most probable.” Dark Matter, Missing Planet, New Comets, Tom Van Flanderen, pp. 185-191, 1991 www.spaceweather.com |
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