NASA joined with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and the World Bank Dec. 3-4 to bring together computer experts looking for new approaches to disaster relief challenges. The third Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) event included more than 1,500 software developers, students and disaster risk experts for a "hackathon" at 20 locations around the world. The locations included New York, Toronto, Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv, Nairobi and Bangalore, India. NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver joined U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to deliver introductory remarks at the RHoK event in New York.
Google Vice President of Research Alfred Spector and RHoK co-founder Patrick Svenburg, director of government platform strategy at Microsoft, also attended. "The RHoK hackathons provide a forum for innovators to come up with real-world solutions that can make a huge difference in people's lives," Garver said. "NASA's commitment to building on its data and opening it up to other users allows us to expand the tools available for disaster response." At a RHoK event in Chicago, a group of hackers worked to create an application that will access mapping data from the Rapid Response Database in NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer project.
The team found the publicly available land imagery after visiting NASA's Open Government website, then worked to create a better interface to select and review the imagery. Response teams could use this tool to more quickly identify areas that may be affected by disasters, such as flooding and forest fires. The first RHoK event was held in Mountain View, Calif., in November 2009. The event resulted in applications that were used after the devastating earthquakes in Haiti and Chile to help identify survivors and help rescuers find them. The second RHoK hackathon took place simultaneously in six countries in June.
Like an earthquake in space, so called space quakes are temblors in Earth's magnetic meadow caused by plasma flying off the sun that could help make the colorful auroras that dance high in Earth's atmosphere, a new study suggests. While felt most powerfully in Earth orbit, these quakes can also reach all the way down to the surface of Earth it. "Magnetic reverberations have been detected at ground stations all around the globe, much like seismic detectors calculate a large earthquake," said Vassilis Angelopoulos of UCLA, principle researcher of NASA's THEMIS spacecraft.
And this rumble can pack a punch. "The total energy in a spacequake can rival that of an extent 5 or 6 earthquake," according to Evgeny Panov of the Space Research Institute in Austria. Panov is first writer of a paper coverage the results of a study on spacequakes in the April 2010 issue of Geophysical Research Letters. Spacequakes aren't the only unearthly temblors around. Scientists have also discovered starquakes, moonquakes and asteroid quakes. In fact, Earth can really stimulate asteroidquakes when wayward space rocks fly too close to our planet. In 2007, THEMIS exposed the precursors of spacequakes.
The action begins in Earth's magnetic tail, which is expanded out like a windsock by the million miles per hour solar wind. Sometimes the tail can become so expanded and tension-filled, it snaps back like an over-torqued rubber band. Solar wind plasma attentive in the tail hurtles toward Earth. On more than one time, the five THEMIS spacecraft were in the line of fire when these "plasma jets" swept by. Clearly, the jets were leaving to hit Earth. But what would happen then? The flotilla moved closer to the planet to find out.
A small earthquake, centered in Germantown, Md. occurred at 5:04 a.m. EDT today, July 16, and its vibrations were felt from West Virginia to Bridgeport, Conn. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center located in Greenbelt, Md., lies about 25 miles east-southeast of today's small earthquake and reported no damages. In fact, there were no reports of damage throughout Maryland. The earthquake registered 3.6 on the Richter scale, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the agency that monitors quakes around the U.S.
USGS reported that the quake occurred today, Friday, July 16, 2010 at 5:04:47 a.m. EDT. The quake originated 5 kilometers deep and it was centered at 39.167°North, 77.252°West, in Germantown, Md. That latitude and longitude positions the quake's epicenter just west of Interstate 270 and south of Maryland state route 119. The USGS noted that the epicenter was 15 km of Rockville, Md., 30 km -northeast of Leesburg, Va., 35 km of Washington, D.C., and 70 km northwest of Annapolis, Md.
The USGS has a website where you can even report what you felt during earthquake events and view a map displaying accumulated data from your report and others. Go to: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/dyfi/events/us/2010yua6/us/index.html.Although earthquakes are monitored by the U.S. Geological Survey, NASA conducts research in various earthquake projects. That research is done in earthquake country, however, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., just outside of Los Angeles.
A NASA-led research team has successfully demonstrated for the first time elements of a prototype tsunami prediction system that quickly and accurately assesses large earthquakes and estimates the size of resulting tsunamis.After the magnitude 8.8 Chilean earthquake on Feb. 27, a team led by Y. Tony Song of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., used real-time data from the agency's Global Differential GPS (GDGPS) network to successfully predict the size of the resulting tsunami.
The network, managed by JPL, combines global and regional real-time data from hundreds of GPS sites and estimates their positions every second. It can detect ground motions as small as a few centimeters. "This successful test demonstrates that coastal GPS systems can effectively be used to predict the size of tsunamis," said Song. "This could allow responsible agencies to issue better warnings that can save lives and reduce false alarms that can unnecessarily disturb the lives of coastal residents."
Song's team concluded that the Chilean earthquake, the fifth largest ever recorded by instruments, would generate a moderate, or local, tsunami unlikely to cause significant destruction in the Pacific. The tsunami's effect was relatively small outside of Chile.
