It might not look as spectacular as an F18/A Hornet on a 60 ft. Mach One highspeed bypass at the Mythbusters show, but it’s faster than you think, even in timelapse.
Tag Archives: sun
A bright sun over Buffalo
And so Alan Friedman was able to make another beautiful picture, again posted on that wonderful website of his, Averted Imagination. This one is from yesterday, and shows us the Sun in Buffalo on May the 5th. The image is taken with a H-alpha filter.
Click on the picture for the full resolution on his own site. He also has a tumblr page, you can find it here.
Mirror, mirror in the sky….
Bad stepmom would have loved it. The Moon as a mirror.
Scientists are planning to use NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to observe next month’s historic transit of Venus across the sun’s face.
But there’s a twist. Researchers can’t point Hubble anywhere near the sun, because our star’s bright light could damage the telescope’s super-sensitive instruments. So Hubble will watch the June 5-6 Venus transit by using the moon as a mirror.
The goal is to see if Hubble can determine the makeup of Venus’ atmosphere by studying sunlight that has poured through it. Astronomers already know a great deal about Venus’ air, so next month’s observations are a test run to see if the technique could be used to determine the atmospheric composition of faraway alien planets, researchers said… (SPACE.com)
The Big Switch
The big switch is reversing the polarity – not on the Enterprise, Geordi LaForge, but on the Sun:
Approximately every 11 years the magnetic field on the sun reverses completely — the north magnetic pole switches to south, and vice versa. It’s as if a bar magnet slowly lost its magnetic field and regained it in the opposite direction, so the positive side becomes the negative side. But, of course, the sun is not a simple bar magnet and the causes of the switch, not to mention the complex tracery of moving magnetic fields throughout the eleven-year cycle, are not easy to map out. … (ScienceDaily)
Can I have my storm, please?
If you notice the complete absence of global catastrophe, it’s because the solar storm that arrived after this week’s series of eruptions from the Sun only struck the Earth a glancing blow.
Now, as people are noticing that the power grid didn’t collapse, computers didn’t fail worldwide, and GPS still worked (as well as it ever did), US space weather experts from the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)have downgraded the threat and are looking for explanations for the surprisingly low impact of the storm.
The only impacts reported by the NOAA are some brief interference with HF radio systems that have already passed. … (The Register)
Heavy!!
A newly discovered planet 4,000 light-years away is just too dense.
Dubbed CoRoT-20b, the planet is thought to be a gas giant about four-fifths the size of Jupiter and orbits close to a sunlike star.
Despite the new planet’s relatively diminutive size, this world has four times Jupiter’s mass, making CoRoT-20b one of the densest known planets, a new study says.
That poses a problem for astronomers: If CoRoT-20b is structured like a traditional gas giant, with a solid core surrounded by a gassy atmosphere, the planet’s core would have to make up 50 to 77 percent of the world’s total mass.
By contrast, Jupiter’s core is thought to represent just 15 percent of that planet’s mass.
To have such a robust core, CoRoT-20b would defy current theories for how planets form. … (NGC)
First, create debris, second, clean it up
In the future, hopefully we will travel farther from Earth. At the same time a lot of satellites will become smaller. And when their end has come, they should be cleaned up.
For mini-satellites, read the following article on the JAXA site.
An ultra-small satellite, so-called micro or nano-satellite, is one weighing less than 100kg in total mass. In this article, I will discuss specifically satellites of under 50kg. R&D on ultra-small satellites is being advanced at a remarkable pace across the world. In Japan, the laboratories of the University of Tokyo and Tokyo Institute of Technology started first to develop cansats weighing several 100 grams and lately succeeded in on-orbit demonstrations of 1kg-class cubesats for the first time in the world. Since then, activities on the satellites have started a trend. Today, energetic and promising young people from many universities and technical colleges have entered the world of the ultra-small satellite. As a result, new fields of space engineering are being explored…. (JAXA)
And if you want more info about the cleanup, here’s a Swiss initiative.
By the middle of the decade, it may be possible to salvage satellites that run out of fuel or suffer minor malfunctions in orbit.
Canada-based aerospace firm MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. is designing a spacecraft that will serve as an orbiting gas station and mechanic. The robotic vehicle will be able to top off satellites’ fuel tanks and perform minor repairs as needed. MDA’s first servicing satellite could be ready to go by 2015 or 2016, if a suitable customer steps up, company officials said.
“The future for space servicing is definitely now,” Dan King, director of orbital robotics at MDA, said during a presentation with NASA’s Future In-Space Operations working group yesterday (Feb. 15). “The key technologies that are needed to do some fundamental operational-type services are here.” … (SPACE.com)
It’s great to see it all come together in the future.
