On February 15, when the world’s astronomers were busy watching Asteroid 2012 DA14 make a close flyby of Earth, a different space rock entered Earth’s atmosphere and broke up over Chelyabinsk, Russia. The shockwave following the meteor’s destruction shattered windows and damaged property throughout the Russian town.
Later that week, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced that it was studying the event, which it predicted may happen every “several of tens to 100 years. The object was found to have been around 17 meters wide and was found to have exploded with a force of nearly 30 times that of the bomb that detonated over Hiroshima, Japan.
This week, NASA has announced that it is also analyzing the event. The agency has released a video detailing everything known about the meteor to date.
In addition to information already disclosed by the ESA, the NASA video reveals that astronomers have been able to devise the meteor’s orbit based on the trajectory of its fireball. The object is now thought to have come from the asteroid belt beyond Mars. Reports of the makeup of the meteor’s debris seem to confirm it was made of stone and a bit of iron, which is common for objects in the asteroid belt.
NASA just released this new video looking at sea surface salinity around the globe. The visualization comes from NASA’s Aquarius instrument aboard the Aquarius/SAC-D spacecraft, from December 2011 through December 2012.
NASA says Aquarius will provide the global view of salinity variability needed for climate studies.
NASA this week announced that Mars rover Curiosity has successfully placed two small samples of rock powder into its “compact laboratories” for analysis.
“Data from the instruments have confirmed the deliveries,” said Jennifer Trosper, Curiosity Mission Manager oat NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
The rock powder comes from the inside of a rock on Mars – the first sample of its kind to be collected. The powder was taken from a small hole that Curiosity drilled in a rock earlier this month. Last week NASA researchers were able to confirm that the rover had actually collected the powder.
The powder had now been placed into Curiosity’s Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) and Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instruments. The CheMin instrument will examine the sample’s mineral composition, while the SAM instrument will determine its chemical composition. The analyses will take place over “the coming days and weeks.”
Both instruments were tested in late 2012 as Curiosity took several scoops of Martian soil while exploring the sandy “Rocknest” area.
The testing of the rover‘s hammering drill the successful rock powder sample gathering were described at the time to be “the biggest milestone accomplishment for the Curiosity team since the sky-crane landing last August.” Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) researchers at JPL have now declared Curiosity to be “fully operational.”
NASA this week released an eight-page report detailing all its engineers have learned about a failed satellite launch that took place on March 4, 2011.
The launch of a Taurus XL T9 rocket, designed by Orbital Science Corporation, was meant to carry the Glory climate change monitoring satellite into orbit. The rocket instead failed to reach orbit, costing the agency around $388 million.
A “mishap investigation board” put together by NASA in the aftermath of the failure determined that the rocket’s fairing system failed to open fully, causing the destruction of the rocket and its payload.
Fairings are clamshell-shaped nosecone devices that surround satellites on their way to orbit. Normally, fairings are jettisoned soon after launch when friction heat from the Earth’s atmosphere is no longer a concern. When Glory’s fairing failed to open, the fairing’s mass altered the rocket’s trajectory. NASA states in its report that the launch vehicle “likely broke up or burned up, or both, because of reentry loads and aerodynamic heating.”
Though the fairing was determined to be the cause of the failure, the NASA board was unable to figure out exactly why the fairing had not opened. The board, though, did narrow down the possibilities to some sort of failure with the frangible joint components of the fairing’s side rail system. Both NASA and Orbital are continuing to investigate the fairing system, and will be making improvements to future designs based on their findings.
Last week, Mars rover Curiosity, after months of meticulous planning, finally used its hammering drill to collect a sample of Martian rock dust.
Today, NASA scientists have released images confirming that the first-ever sample of drilled rock dust is safely in one of Curiosity’s sample scoops.
“Seeing the powder from the drill in the scoop allows us to verify for the first time the drill collected a sample as it bore into the rock,” said Scott McCloskey, drill systems engineer for Curiosity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “Many of us have been working toward this day for years. Getting final confirmation of successful drilling is incredibly gratifying. For the sampling team, this is the equivalent of the landing team going crazy after the successful touchdown.”
In the coming days, the rock sample will be enclosed in Curiosity’s Collection and Handling for In-Situ Martian Rock Analysis (CHIMRA) instrument and sieved to remove particles larger than 150 microns (0.006 inches). Small portions of the sample will then be placed inside the rover’s Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) and Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instruments to determine its mineral and chemical make-up.
The historic drilling took place on February 8, when the rover used its drill to bore a 6.4 centimeter (2.5-inch) hole into a rock named “John Klein.” Researchers hope the rock dust will provide information about Mars’ wet past, and possibly about whether life could have once existed on the red planet.
This week, astronomers revealed that a new system has been found that contains planets smaller than Earth. The new data has been presented in a paper published recently in the journal Nature.
The planets orbit around a star called Kepler-37, located around 210 light-years from our solar system. The smallest of the planest found, known as Kepler-37b, is only one-third the size of Earth – smaller than the planet Mercury and just slightly larger than Earth’s moon. The planet is not presumed to have an atmosphere, and scientists predict that life on the planet isn’t likely.
“Even Kepler can only detect such a tiny world around the brightest stars it observes,” said Jack Lissauer, planetary scientist at NASA‘s Ames Research Center. “The fact we’ve discovered tiny Kepler-37b suggests such little planets are common, and more planetary wonders await as we continue to gather and analyze additional data.”
Two other planets were found in the Kepler-37 system. Kepler-37c orbits further out and is slightly smaller than Venus, or around three-quarters the size of Earth. Kepler-37d is the furthest planet out, and is around twice the size of Earth. Kepler-37 itself is slightly smaller and cooler than the sun.
All three of the planets orbit Kepler-37 at less than than the distance between the sun and Mercury. They each also orbit their star in 40 days or less. The surface temperature of Kepler-37b is estimated to be higher than 800 degrees Fahrenheit.
“We uncovered a planet smaller than any in our solar system orbiting one of the few stars that is both bright and quiet, where signal detection was possible,” said Thomas Barclay, lead author of the paper and a Kepler scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute. “This discovery shows close-in planets can be smaller, as well as much larger, than planets orbiting our sun.”
NASA this week revealed that a “chance encounter” with solar wind around Saturn has allowed the Cassini probe to detect particles being accelerated to high energy states. The phenomenon is similar to the acceleration of high-energy cosmic rays found coming from supernova remnants just last week.
The findings, published this week in the journal Nature Physics, show how certain kinds of solar winds can accelerate electrons. NASA in a statement today said that solar wind around Saturn’s magnetic field forms a shockwave that Cassini can use to study the particle acceleration effect.
“Cassini has essentially given us the capability of studying the nature of a supernova shock in situ in our own solar system, bridging the gap to distant high-energy astrophysical phenomena that are usually only studied remotely,” said Adam Masters, lead researcher on the paper and a researcher at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science.
The detection of electron acceleration around Saturn came just as a strong shockwave was detected by Cassini. The researchers are looking for “quasi-parallel” shockwaves, which occur when a magnetic field and the direction of the shock are closely aligned.
Shockwaves, such as those from a supernova or solar wind, are common in the universe. When they hit magnetic fields with certain orientations, particles from the shockwave can be accelerated to close the speed of light. These interactions, scientists believe, could be the source of much of the cosmic rays seen in the universe.
Maxwell announced the news himself in a Google+ post on Saturday in which he called Google “perhaps my favorite company — not perfect, as no company (or person) can be, but very very good.”
“They’re also famous for their employee perks, which will be nice, but there was something that was far more important to me,” he added. “Google’s company mantra, as you might know, is ‘Don’t be evil.’ So both times I interviewed there, I asked every single person I talked to — a couple of dozen people in total — this question: ‘Is that ‘Don’t be evil’ stuff just something they worry about at the higher levels and not part of your life, or does it filter down to you?’”
Every person he talked to, he says, had a story when they had to choose between doing something that would make Google more money (but be evil) and something that would make the company less money (but not be evil), and that everyone chose the “non-evil” path every time. According to Maxwell’s account, these Googlers were always supported, or even rewarded for their choices.
Maxwell continued, “And I said to myself, these are people with integrity and a company with integrity — a company that has made sure to bake that integrity into its very DNA, all the way down to their lowest-level engineers, as insurance that it will keep itself honest (And there’s more: for example, they’ve encrypted user data and made it off-limits even to their own employees without several layers of authorization — and they’ve done it quietly, not for publicity, just because it’s the right thing to do.) This is a place I want to be. This is a place where I will feel at home.”
Today at around 2:20 pm EST an asteroid named 2012 da14 will come within 17,200 miles of the surface of Earth. Almost one year ago NASA was able to determine that the asteroid definitely does not pose a danger to the planet, at least not on this approach.
With the asteroid’s approach so near and the public’s growing awareness of the event, NASA has released another video to try and reassure people that doomsday is not on the way. It’s similar to the “Why the World Didn’t End Yesterday” video the agency released more than a week before the Maya Apocalypse doomsday scenarios predictably fell flat. Besides the obvious duty to assuage public fears, it’s clear NASA finds it valuable to have a record of using science to make predictions that actually come true.
The new video features James Green, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, and Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for the OSIRIS-REx mission, describing just how scientists know da14 isn’t a danger (hint: they use math) and what an exciting event today’s record-setting close flyby is for astronomers. The OSIRIS-REx mission is scheduled to launch a probe in 2016 that will visit an asteroid that actually might hit the Earth in the late 22nd century.
A new study has found that the leftover material from supernovas could be the source of mysterious cosmic rays.
The paper, to be published tomorrow in the journal Science, used data from NASA‘s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to examine the fast-moving particles and determine their origins.
“Scientists have been trying to find the sources of high-energy cosmic rays since their discovery a century ago,” said Elizabeth Hays, a member of the research team and Fermi deputy project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “Now we have conclusive proof supernova remnants, long the prime suspects, really do accelerate cosmic rays to incredible speeds.”
Cosmic Rays are some of the fastest-moving particles ever detected. They are made up of subatomic particles such as electrons and atomic nuclei, though around 90% of them are protons. They travel at very close to light speed and are easily deflected by magnetic fields.
The Fermi Telescope was used to observe the IC443 (the Jellyfish Nebula) and W44 supernova remnants, where gamma rays are emitted by high-speed particles as they leave the remnants. Fermi researchers looked at four years of Fermi data and found that the gamma rays are a result of neutral pion particles, which are formed when cosmic rays (specifically the protons) hit non-cosmic ray protons.
“The discovery is the smoking gun that these two supernova remnants are producing accelerated protons,” said Stefan Funk, the research team leader and an astrophysicist with the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University. “Now we can work to better understand how they manage this feat and determine if the process is common to all remnants where we see gamma-ray emission.”
On February 15, tomorrow, an asteroid named 2012 DA14 will fly within several thousand miles of the surface of the Earth. At its closest approach the asteroid will come within 17,200 miles of the Earth’s surface – a harrowingly close miss that comes well within the ring of man-made geosynchronous satellites that orbit the Earth. The flyby will set a record for closest approach by an object of DA14’s size.
Though researchers have determined there is no danger posed by the object, the event will be a spectacle for astronomers around the world. Though the asteroid won’t be bright enough to see with the naked eye, those with a telescope or even a good pair of binoculars will be able to spot it.
For those who can’t observe the asteroid on their own, NASA announced this week that it will be live-streaming coverage of the object’s approach. The broadcast will provide commentary from scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and real-time animation to demonstrate exactly where the asteroid is. A Live view of the asteroid itself will also be featured, assuming the weather over observatories isn’t cloudy.
The half-hour live-stream will begin tomorrow at 2 pm EST, and can be seen on NASA TV or on the JPL Ustream page. The JPL Ustream will also begin showing footage of the asteroid from Australian and European observatories starting at 12 pm EST. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center will stream footage of the asteroid from one of its telescopes starting at 9 pm EST, and researchers there will be taking questions via Twitter.
Astronomers have found evidence that suggests the youngest black hole in the Milky Way galaxy may reside in the remnants of a rare supernova.
The remnant, named W49B, is only around 1,000 years old and only 26,000 light-years from Earth. Astronomers have called the object “rare” because of the way the supernova took place. Instead of explosively ejecting matter in all directions the way an supernova does, W49B is the result of a supernova that ejected material from a star’s poles at a higher speeds than other material, creating jets that shaped the remnant.
A paper on the phenomenon is to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
“W49B is the first of its kind to be discovered in the galaxy,” said Laura Lopez, lead researcher on the study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “It appears its parent star ended its life in a way that most others don’t.”
The data used in the study was obtained using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. W49B now glows brightly with X-rays, and Chandra was able to determine the distribution of elements in the remnant. The researchers found an uneven distribution of iron, matching predictions for asymmetric supernovae.
Astronomers searched for X-ray or radio pulses from the remnant, which would provide evidence for a neutron star, but found none. This suggests that a new black hole could have been formed at the core of the supernova.
“It’s a bit circumstantial, but we have intriguing evidence the W49B supernova also created a black hole,” said Daniel Castro, co-author of the paper. “If that is the case, we have a rare opportunity to study a supernova responsible for creating a young black hole.”
(Image courtesy NASA/CXC/MIT/L.Lopez et al/Palomar/NSF/NRAO/VLA)
A new study has shown that much of the Middle East lost freshwater reserves over the past decade.
The study, to be published this week in the journal Water Resources Research, was based on data from NASA‘s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites. The findings show that, starting in 2003, parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins lost 144 cubic kilometers (117 million acre feet) of stored freshwater – nearly the same about of water found in the Dead Sea.
“GRACE data show an alarming rate of decrease in total water storage in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins, which currently have the second fastest rate of groundwater storage loss on Earth, after India,” said Jay Famiglietti, principle investigator of the study and a hydrologist at the University of California, Irvine. “The rate was especially striking after the 2007 drought. Meanwhile, demand for freshwater continues to rise, and the region does not coordinate its water management because of different interpretations of international laws.”
The GRACE satellites measure water reserves using gravitational measurements. Since the level of water reserves alters the Earth’s mass, the satellites can precisely measure local gravitational effects to estimate a region’s change in water reserves.
The study blames around 60% of the loss to the pumping of groundwater from underground reservoirs. Around another 20% was attributed to soil drying and snowpack shrinkage. The final one-fifth was attributed to the loss of surface water from lakes and reservoirs.
“The Middle East just does not have that much water to begin with, and it’s a part of the world that will be experiencing less rainfall with climate change,” said Famiglietti. “Those dry areas are getting dryer. The Middle East and the world’s other arid regions need to manage available water resources as best they can.”
NASA this week successfully launched its Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM). An Atlas V rocket was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base at 1:02 pm EST on Monday, February 11.
The new satellite will be used, as previous Landsat satellites have, to monitor the earth’s climate and geography. It is the eighth satellite in the Landsat series that has been observing the Earth since 1972. The LDCM’s Operational Land Imager (OLI) will collect data in visible and infrared spectrums, while its Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) will collect data on the heat emitted from the surface of the Earth.
“Landsat is a centerpiece of NASA’s Earth Science program, and today’s successful launch will extend the longest continuous data record of Earth’s surface as seen from space,” said Charles Bolden, NASA administrator. “This data is a key tool for monitoring climate change and has led to the improvement of human and biodiversity health, energy and water management, urban planning, disaster recovery, and agriculture monitoring – all resulting in incalculable benefits to the U.S. and world economy.”
The satellite deployed its solar arrays 86 minutes after launch. It is currently powering up and will enter a sun-synchronous polar orbit within two months. During the next three months the satellite will be put through its paces during a check-out phase. After that, control of the LDCM will be transferred to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
“LDCM is the best Landsat satellite ever built,” said Jim Irons, a LDCM project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “The technology will advance and improve the array of scientific investigations and resource management applications supported by Landsat images. I anticipate new knowledge and applications to emerge with an increasing demand for the data.”
NASA announced this week that it will host the first-ever Google+ Hangout live from the International Space Station (ISS).
The Hangout will take place from 11 am to 12 pm EST on February 22. The event will allow NASA fans to interact with astronauts both on Earth and aboard the ISS. Astronauts Kevin Ford, Chris Hadfield, and Tom Marshburn will be on-hand to answer questions about life on the ISS.
Since only up to 10 people can “Hangout” at one time (though the event will be open for anyone to watch live), NASA is encouraging its social media fans to submit video questions before the Hangout. During the Hangout “several” of these video questions will be chosen to be aired and answered by the ISS station crew and other astronauts. The videos must be uploaded to YouTube with the tag #askAstro and must be 30 seconds or shorter. The deadline for submitting videos is February 12.
NASA will also take live questions from its social media feeds on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ during the Hangout. The same hashtag, #askAstro, will be used to identify questions during the Hangout. The agency stated that “unique and original questions” are more likely to be answered.
Though this is the first NASA Hangout from the ISS, it won’t be the last. The agency has stated that it will continue to host Hangouts “with astronauts on the ground and in space, scientists, engineers, and managers on the agency’s missions and milestones.”
After months of careful planning and tests, Mars rover Curiosity has finally used its hammering drill to collect a bedrock sample on Mars. The event marks the first time any rover has drilled into a rock on the red planet.
Curiosity left a hole 0.63 inches (1.6 cm) wide and 2.5 inches (6.4 cm) deep in a flat, veiny rock named “John Klein.” As the rover drilled into the rock, rock powder traveled up flutes on the drill bit, which has holding chambers for the powder. The sample obtained by the rover should help researchers determine whether the rock was ever underwater.
“The most advanced planetary robot ever designed is now a fully operating analytical laboratory on Mars,” said John Grunsfeld, NASA associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate. “This is the biggest milestone accomplishment for the Curiosity team since the sky-crane landing last August, another proud day for America.”
Over the next few days, the rock powder will be processed and tested to determine its mineral make-up and chemical composition.
“We’ll take the powder we acquired and swish it around to scrub the internal surfaces of the drill bit assembly,” said Scott McCloskey, drill systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “Then we’ll use the arm to transfer the powder out of the drill into the scoop, which will be our first chance to see the acquired sample.”
The successful drilling marks another milestone for the rover itself. All of Curiosity’s instruments have now been tested on Mars, and the rover has been deemed fully operational.
“Building a tool to interact forcefully with unpredictable rocks on Mars required an ambitious development and testing program,” said Louise Jandura, chief engineer for Curiosity’s sample system at JPL. “To get to the point of making this hole in a rock on Mars, we made eight drills and bored more than 1,200 holes in 20 types of rock on Earth.”
One week from today an asteroid will swing within just 17,200 miles of Earth – closer than geosynchronous satellites that orbit the planet. While there is no chance of an impact event on February 15, there are other asteroids that could collide with the Earth sometime in the future.
To prepare for (and hopefully prevent) such a disaster, NASA has formed the Near-Earth Object (NEO) observations program, which finds and tracks potential celestial threats. The program estimates that there are over 1,300 “Potentially Hazardous Asteroids” (PHA) with a small chance of hitting the Earth someday.
Today, NASA outlined its next step in better understanding those objects to help researchers more accurately predict the probability of future impacts. In 2016 the agency will launch OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, and Regolith Explorer), a spacecraft designed to visit a PHA and measure its properties.
The spacecraft will arrive in orbit around an asteroid named 1999 RQ36 in the year 2018. The object is 457 meters across and is also one of most threatening PHAs yet found.
“For such a large object, it has one of the highest known probabilities of impacting Earth, a 1 in 2,400 chance late in the 22nd century, according to calculations by Steve Chesley, an astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory,” said Edward Beshore, deputy principal investigator for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission and a researcher at the University of Arizona.
The most important measurement the probe will make is of the Yarkovsky effect, which occurs as a result of asteroids heating and cooling.
“When an asteroid makes a close pass to Earth, the gravitational pull from our planet changes the asteroid’s orbit,” said Beshore. “However, how this change will affect the evolution of the asteroid’s orbit is difficult for us to predict because there are also other small forces continuously acting on the asteroid to change its orbit. The most significant of these smaller forces is the Yarkovsky effect – a minute push on an asteroid that happens when it is warmed up by the sun and then later re-radiates this heat in a different direction as infrared radiation.”
The magnitude of the effect is difficult to determine from Earth, since asteroids have different sizes, shapes, and compositions. Beshore and his colleagues expect OSIRIS-REx to provide an estimate of the Yarkovsky force on RQ36 twice as precise as current ones. The measurements should help researchers better estimate the effect on other asteroids.
If new estimates find RQ36 to be an imminent danger to Earth, researchers will have to come up with a way to alter the object’s orbit.
“There are several mitigation strategies,” said Beshore. “We could explode a small nuclear device close above the surface on one side of the asteroid. This could be very effective – it would vaporize the surface layer, which would then fly off at very high speed, causing a rocket thrust that would shove everything over by a few centimeters per second. This might be plenty to deflect the asteroid. Other strategies include kinetic impactors, where you strike an asteroid very hard with a heavy projectile moving at high speed. In 2005, NASA’s Deep Impact mission hit comet Tempel 1 with a 370-kilogram (over 815-pound) copper slug at about five kilometers per second (over 11,000 miles per hour), not nearly enough to significantly alter the orbit of the five-kilometer-sized body, but a proof of the technology for this kind of mission. Another idea is to use a gravity tractor – station a spacecraft precisely enough near the asteroid which would gradually deflect it with only its gravitational pull.”
NASA this week revealed that astronomers have discovered a mysterious object that acts like a strobe light. The object, named LRLL 54361, releases a flash of light every 25.34 days. Though other objects in the universe have been observed with similar patterns, this one is the most powerful yet seen.
In a new paper published recently in the journal Nature, astronomers have proposed that the strobe effect is caused by interactions between two very young stars (protostars) that orbit each other (binary star). As material is dumped into the growing binary star, they believe that the flashes are caused by a blast of radiation unleashed when the stars closely approach each other in their orbits. Such an event, known as a pulsed accretion, has been observed before, but never with such regularity or in a system so young. The binary star is estimated to be no more than a few hundred thousand years old.
“This protostar has such large brightness variations with a precise period that it is very difficult to explain,” said James Muzerolle, co-author of the paper and a researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute.
LRLL 54361 is located 950 light-years from Earth in a star-forming region named IC 348. The discovery of its strobe-like property was made using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, and astronomers used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to confirm the observations and reveal the structure of the system.
Though the gas and dust surrounding the system prevents it from being observed directly, the Hubble was able to detect two “cavaties” in the material on opposite sides of a central dust disc. Astronomers believe the cavities were created by an outflow from near the binary star.
(Image courtesy NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/NOAO/University of Arizona/ Max Planck Institute for Astronomy/University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
A new study using data from NASA‘s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) mission has put forth an explanation for an interstellar “ribbon” of energetic neutral atoms. The ribbon confounded researchers in 2009 when IBEX was able to map the interstellar boundary at the edge of our heliosphere, where particles from inside the solar system interact with and bounce off galactic material. Many more energetic particles were found to be streaming from the ribbon than in other places.
The new paper, published this week in The Astrophysical Journal, proposes that the ribbon is in an area where neutral hydrogen atoms from solar wind cross the galactic magnetic field, stripping away their electrons and changing them into charged ions. The particles then become trapped in the ribbon regions by vibrations in the magnetic field.
“Think of the ribbon as a harbor and the solar wind particles it contains as boats,” says Nathan Schwadron, first author on the paper and researcher at The University of New Hampshire. “The boats can be trapped in the harbor if the ocean waves outside it are powerful enough. This is the nature of the new ribbon model. The ribbon is a region where particles, originally from the solar wind, become trapped or retained due to intense waves and vibrations in the magnetic field.”
Previous models testing the magnetic field hypothesis had predicted a ribbon that was narrower than the one measured by IBEX. The new model fits with actual observations, and Schwadron stated that the math looks “remarkably like what the ribbon actually looks like.”
“This is a perfect example of the scientific process,” said David McComas, co-author of the paper and the principal investigator for the IBEX mission at the Southwest Research Institute. “We observe something completely new and unexpected with IBEX, develop various hypotheses to explain the observations, and then develop mathematical models to try to validate the hypotheses.”
The new hypothesis has yet to be confirmed, and changes in the ribbon in conjunction with solar wind will be observed to see if they match up with the new model. If correct, though, the findings could help researchers understand more about how the heliosphere interacts with the galaxy.
“The ribbon can be used to tell us how we’re moving through the magnetic fields of the interstellar medium and how those magnetic fields then influence our space environment,” said Schwadron.
(Image courtesy NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio)
NASA‘s Deep Impact spacecraft has snapped several images of the comet ISON (C/2012 S1). The images were obtained over 36 hours on January 17 and 18, from a distance of 793 million km (493 million miles). The comet is expected to come within 1.8 million km (1.1 million miles) of the sun and burn bright enough to be seen from Earth with the naked eye.
“This is the fourth comet on which we have performed science observations and the farthest point from Earth from which we’ve tried to transmit data on a comet,” said Tim Larson, project manager for Deep Impact at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “The distance limits our bandwidth, so it’s a little like communicating through a modem after being used to DSL. But we’re going to coordinate our science collection and playback so we maximize our return on this potentially spectacular comet.”
Comet ISON was only just discovered in September of 2012 by Russian astronomers. NASA has determined that the comet is making its first-ever journey into the the inner solar system. Researchers believe that means the object’s surface will have plenty of volatile material that will be burned off by the sun. Long-period comets such as ISON come from the Oort cloud, a cloud of icy objects that surround the solar system at an incredible distance – as far away as one-third the distance to the Sun’s nearest neighbor star.
NASA has stated that there is no chance comet ISON will be a risk to the Earth. The object’s closest approach to the planet will be on December 26, 2013, and the comet’s head and tail should be visible during its closest approach to the sun.
In addition to the visible light images seen below, data from Deep Impact is expected to provide researchers with infrared data and light curves for the comet. Though the object is currently over 763 million km (474 million miles) from the Sun, its tail is already estimated to be over 64,400 km (40,000 miles) long.
A NASA balloon has broken the record for longest flight. The balloon, which carries the Super Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder (Super-TIGER), spent 55 days, 1 hour, and 34 minutes circling the South Pole at 127,000 feet – over four times the altitude of commercial airplanes. The previous record for a balloon of that size was 46 days.
The record-breaking balloon also broke the record for longest flight of a heavy-lift scientific balloon, beating the previous record (set by NASA’s Super Pressure Balloon in 2009) by five minutes.
“This is an outstanding achievement for NASA’s Astrophysics balloon team,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. “Keeping these huge balloons aloft for such long periods lets us do forefront science that would be difficult to do otherwise.”
The balloon was held aloft by wind patterns at the South pole. Anticyclonic winds that circulate from east to west in the stratosphere there enable long-duration balloon flights.
The Super-TIGER instrument aboard the balloon measured rare elements heavier than iron in the cosmic rays that constantly strike the Earth’s atmosphere. The data will be used to research the origins of the particles and how they reach their high energy states. Researchers estimate the device detected 50 million cosmic rays, and that the data will take around two years to fully analyze.
“This has been a very successful flight because of the long duration, which allowed us to detect large numbers of cosmic rays,” said Bob Binns, principal investigator of the Super-TIGER mission. “The instrument functioned very well.”
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