Solar Movement Rising On the Sun 2012

A lot is person said about what is occurrence after a large coronal mass ejection, or CME, darned from the Sun a few days rear. It was on 2012 November 23 that the huge eruption happened on the Sun, and since then speculations are leaving on about the kind of behavior happening on the surface.

It was established after the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), manage to capture the CME moment. It was told such type of picture, known as a corona graph; reflect how the brightest light from the sun is barren from direct view. To explain it further, it have been claimed that CME involves distribution solar particle into space and then, reaching Earth 1 to 3 days later. It has also been claimed that this is the 3rd such Earth-directed CME as November 20th.

The Solar Fried Planets Atmosphere

An international team of astronomers has fixed a star in the work of devouring one of its planets. BD+48 740, a red giant they pragmatic using the 9.2-meter Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas, appears to have the gas of a scorched planet in its atmosphere.  This is reliable with a rocky world, recently destroyed.

The great researchers who concentrate in stellar evolution have lengthy known that the inner planets are in danger.  The trouble starts in the isolated future when the sun's core runs out of hydrogen fuel for nuclear fusion. To keep the fires flaming, the sun will begin to fuse hydrogen external the core, in a layer closer to the stellar surface. This will turn the sun into a red oversize, at least 200 times wider than it is today. Mercury, Venus, Earth and possibly even Mars might be engulfed. 

The fate of Earth is not a confidence, however. Some researchers believe that Earth's orbit might spiral outward, keeping the planet at a safe space from the future inferno.  This could happen if solar winds carry a path a major fraction of the sun's mass in the years most important up to the red giant phase. On the other hand, the sun might get bigger so fast that our planet has no chance to escape.  Earth would get trapped in the sun's rapidly advancing atmosphere and spiral innermost to oblivion.

Nasa map to direct Chandrayaan-2 on moon

The first ever entire map of moon’s surface being developed by the US’s National Aeronautics & Space Administration (Nasa) will show India’s second unmanned lunar mission Chandrayaan-2 the method around on moon. The map, which is being ready by Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre by using its lunar reconnaissance orbiter (LRO) spacecraft that is orbiting moon, will help India’s 2013 planned Chandrayaan-2 decide its precise landing point on the lunar surface, resource in the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) told DNA.

As a associate of the international lunar exploration working group, India is in line to obtain Nasa’s lunar map data when the work will be complete, for a time in 2013, in time for Chandrayaan-2 to be launched. The Chandrayaan-2 will comprise a 1,200 kg Russian intended and developed moon lander carrying a single 15 kg rover developed by Isro in collaboration with Russia. The lander will also carry a 35 kg scientific payload powered by solar panels, an equipment to analyse the lunar soil and notice the presence of water, a seismometer, a laser reflector, and will place a landing beacon to assist future moon landings.

According to them, the data being compiled will contain digital elevations and terrain maps which will act as fundamental reference for future scientific and human examination missions to the moon, beginning with Chandrayaan-2. “The data will be used by space scientists for a time of six months before being put into the free domain,” RR Navalgund, director of Ahmedabad-based Space Application Centre (SAC), told DNA. Chandrayaan-2 will pick up from where Chandrayaan-1 (October 2008-August 2009) left off after recording the discovery of water and water ice on moon, chiefly in moon’s polar region.

Global Eruption Rocks the Sun

On August 1, 2010, an entire hemisphere of the sun erupted. Filaments of magnetism snapped and exploded, shock waves raced across the stellar surface, billion-ton clouds of hot gas billowed into space. Astronomers knew they had witnessed something big. It was so big, it may have shattered old ideas about solar activity. "The August 1st event really opened our eyes," says Karel Schrijver of Lockheed Martin’s Solar and Astrophysics Lab in Palo Alto, CA. "We see that solar storms can be global events, playing out on scales we scarcely imagined before." For the past three months, Schrijver has been working with fellow Lockheed-Martin solar physicist Alan Title to understand what happened during the "Great Eruption."

They had plenty of data: The event was recorded in unprecedented detail by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory and twin STEREO spacecraft. With several colleagues present to offer commentary, they outlined their findings at a press conference today at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. Explosions on the sun are not localized or isolated events, they announced. Instead, solar activity is interconnected by magnetism over breathtaking distances. Solar flares, tsunamis, coronal mass ejections--they can go off all at once, hundreds of thousands of miles apart, in a dizzyingly-complex concert of violence.

"To predict eruptions we can no longer focus on the magnetic fields of isolated active regions," says Title, "we have to know the surface magnetic field of practically the entire sun." This revelation increases the work load for space weather forecasters, but it also increases the potential accuracy of their forecasts. "The whole-sun approach could lead to breakthroughs in predicting solar activity," commented Rodney Viereck of NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, CO. "This in turn would provide improved forecasts to our customers such as electric power grid operators and commercial airlines, who could take action to protect their systems and ensure the safety of passengers and crew."

NASA Loves A Good Challenge-Not Business As Usual

NASA's pioneering use of prize competitions and innovation challenges is a dramatic departure from government's traditional "business as usual." The agency's innovation and technology challenges include prizes that encourage independent teams to race to achieve bold goals without any upfront government funding. NASA benefits from private sector investments many times greater than the cash value of prizes, and the agency only pays for results. "NASA prize competitions unlock the extraordinary, sometimes untapped potential of U.S. students, private companies of all sizes and citizen inventors," said NASA Chief Technologist Bobby Braun at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "These individuals and teams are providing creative solutions to NASA challenges while fostering new technology, new industries and innovation across the United States."

NASA has a history of broad and successful experiences with prize challenges. The agency is a leader in government-sponsored competitions that solve problems to benefit the space program and nation. Since 2005, NASA has conducted 20 Centennial Challenges in six areas and awarded $4.5 million to 13 teams. Each challenge is managed by non-profit organizations in partnership with NASA. In July, NASA announced three new challenges and is seeking non-profit organizations to manage them. The challenges are: The Nano-Satellite Launch Challenge is to place a small satellite into Earth orbit, twice in one week, for a prize of $2 million. The goals of this challenge are to stimulate innovations in low-cost launch technology and encourage commercial nano-satellite delivery services.

The Night Rover Challenge is to demonstrate a solar-powered exploration vehicle that can operate in darkness using its own stored energy. The prize purse is $1.5 million. The objective of this challenge is to stimulate innovations in energy storage technologies for extreme space environments, such as the surface of the moon, or for electric vehicles and renewable energy systems on Earth. The Sample Return Robot Challenge is to demonstrate a robot that can locate and retrieve geologic samples from varied terrain without human control. This challenge has a prize purse of $1.5 million. The objective is to encourage innovations in automatic navigation and robotic technologies.

NASA's Magnetospheric Mission Passes Major Milestone

The universe is still an arcane place that scientists know very little about, but a new NASA Solar Terrestrial Probe mission is going to shed light on one especially mysterious event called magnetic reconnection. It occurs when magnetic lines of force cross, cancel, and reconnect releasing magnetic energy in the form of heat and charged-particle kinetic energy. On the sun, magnetic reconnection causes solar flares more powerful than several atomic bombs combined. In Earth's atmosphere, magnetic reconnection dispenses magnetic storms and auroras, and in laboratories on Earth it can cause big problems in fusion reactors.

Although the study of magnetic reconnection dates back to the 1950s and despite numerous scientific papers addressing this perplexing issue, scientists still cannot agree on one accepted model. In 2014, NASA is scheduled to launch a satellite that will greatly increase our understanding of this phenomenon when it launches the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission, a suite of four identical spacecraft that will study magnetic reconnection in the best possible laboratory – the Earth’s magnetosphere. The spacecraft will obtain measurements necessary to test prevailing theories as to how reconnection is enabled and how it progresses.

Recently, NASA and members of an independent review board painstakingly reviewed every aspect of the MMS mission, and successfully completed the mission’s critical design review. This technical review is held to ensure that a mission can proceed into fabrication, demonstration and test and can meet stated performance requirements, including cost, schedule, risk and other system constraints. According to MMS deputy project scientist Mark Adrian of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., “This is the last hurdle before the spacecraft and instrument teams begin to build actual flight hardware.” MMS was approved for implementation in June 2009 following a successful Preliminary Design Review in May 2009.

NASA Selects Investigations For First Mission To Encounter The Sun

NASA has begun development of a mission to visit and study the sun closer than ever before. The unprecedented project, named Solar Probe Plus, is slated to launch no later than 2018. The small car-sized spacecraft will plunge directly into the sun's atmosphere approximately four million miles from our star's surface. It will explore a region no other spacecraft ever has encountered. NASA has selected five science investigations that will unlock the sun's biggest mysteries. "The experiments selected for Solar Probe Plus are specifically designed to solve two key questions of solar physics why is the sun's outer atmosphere so much hotter than the sun's visible surface and what propels the solar wind that affects Earth and our solar system? " said Dick Fisher.

As the spacecraft approaches the sun, its revolutionary carbon-composite heat shield must withstand temperatures exceeding 2550 degrees Fahrenheit and blasts of intense radiation. The spacecraft will have an up close and personal view of the sun enabling scientists to better understand, characterize and forecast the radiation environment for future space explorers. NASA invited researchers in 2009 to submit science proposals. Thirteen were reviewed by a panel of NASA and outside scientists. The total dollar amount for the five selected investigations is approximately $180 million for preliminary analysis, design, development and tests.The selected proposals are:

Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons Investigation: principal investigator, Justin C. Kasper, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass. This investigation will specifically count the most abundant particles in the solar wind electrons, protons and helium ions and measure their properties. The investigation also is designed to catch some of the particles in a special cup for direct analysis. Wide-field Imager: principal investigator, Russell Howard, Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. This telescope will make 3-D images of the sun's corona, or atmosphere. The experiment actually will see the solar wind and provide 3-D images of clouds and shocks as they approach and pass the spacecraft. This investigation complements instruments on the spacecraft providing direct measurements by imaging the plasma the other instruments sample.

Drought Drives Decade-Long Decline in Plant Growth

Global plant productivity that once was on the rise with warming temperatures and a lengthened growing season is now on the decline because of regional drought according to a new study of NASA satellite data. Plant productivity is a measure of the rate of the photosynthesis process that green plants use to convert solar energy, carbon dioxide and water to sugar, oxygen and eventually plant tissue. Compared with a 6 percent increase in plant productivity during the 1980s and 1990s, the decline observed over the last decade is only 1 percent. The shift, however, could impact food security, biofuels and the global carbon cycle.

Researchers Maosheng Zhao and Steven Running of the University of Montana in Missoula discovered the global shift from an analysis of NASA satellite data. The discovery comes from an analysis of plant productivity data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on NASA's Terra satellite, combined with other growing season climate data, including temperature, solar radiation and water. "We see this as a bit of a surprise, and potentially significant on a policy level because previous interpretations suggested global warming might actually help plant growth around the world," Running said.

Previous research found land plant productivity was on the rise. A 2003 paper in the journal Science led by scientist Ramakrishna Nemani, now a researcher at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., showed the 6 percent increase in global terrestrial plant productivity between 1982 and 1999. The increase was traced to nearly two decades of temperature, solar radiation and water availability conditions, influenced by climate change, that were favorable for plant growth. Setting out to update that analysis, Zhao and Running expected to see similar results as global average temperatures continued to climb.

IBEX Spacecraft Finds Discoveries Close to Home

Imagine floating 35,000 miles above the sunny side of Earth. Our home planet gleams below, a majestic whorl of color and texture. All seems calm around you. With no satellites or space debris to dodge, you can just relax and enjoy the black emptiness of space. But looks can be deceiving. In reality, you've unknowingly jumped into an invisible mosh pit of electromagnetic mayhem the place in space where a supersonic "wind" of charged particles from the Sun crashes head-on into the protective magnetic bubble that surrounds our planet. Traveling at a million miles per hour, the solar wind's protons and electrons sense Earth's magnetosphere too late to flow smoothly around it.

Instead, they're shocked, heated, and slowed almost to a stop as they pile up along its outer boundary, the magnetopause, before getting diverted sideways. Space physicists have had a general sense of these dynamic goings on for decades. But it wasn't until the advent of the Interstellar Boundary Explorer or IBEX, a NASA spacecraft launched in October 2008, that they've been able to see what the human eye cannot: the first-ever images of this electromagnetic crash scene. They can now witness how some of the solar wind's charged particles are being neutralized by gas escaping from Earth's atmosphere.

IBEX wasn't designed to keep tabs on Earth's magnetosphere. Instead, its job is to map interactions occurring far beyond the planets, 8 to 10 billion miles away, where the Sun's own magnetic bubble, the heliosphere, meets interstellar space. Only two spacecraft, Voyagers 1 and 2, have ventured far enough to probe this region directly. IBEX, which travels in a looping, 8-day-long orbit around Earth, stays much closer to home, but it carries a pair of detectors that can observe the interaction region from afar.

Coronal Mass Ejection Headed for Earth

On August 1st around 0855 UT, Earth orbiting satellites detected a C3-class solar flare. The origin of the blast was Earth-facing sunspot 1092. C-class solar flares are small and usually have few noticeable consequences here on Earth besides aurorae. This one has spawned a coronal mass ejection heading in Earth's direction. Coronal mass ejections large clouds of charged particles that are ejected from the Sun over the course of several hours and can carry up to ten billion tons plasma. They expand away from the Sun at speeds as high as a million miles an hour. A CME can make the 93-million-mile journey to Earth in just three to four days. When a coronal mass ejection reaches Earth, it interacts with our planet’s magnetic field, potentially creating a geomagnetic storm.

Solar particles stream down the field lines toward Earth’s poles and collide with atoms of nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere, resulting in spectacular auroral displays. On the evening of August 3rd/4th, skywatchers in the northern U.S. and other countries should look toward the north for the rippling dancing “curtains” of green and red light. The Sun goes through a regular activity cycle about 11 years long. The last solar maximum occurred in 2001 and its recent extreme solar minimum was particularly weak and long lasting. These kinds of eruptions are one of the first signs that the Sun is waking up and heading toward another solar maximum expected in the 2013 time frame.

Martian Dust Devil Whirls into Opportunity's View

In its six-and-a-half years on Mars, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity had never seen a dust devil before this month, despite some systematic searches in past years and the fact that its twin rover, Spirit, has seen dozens of dust devils at its location halfway around the planet. A tall column of swirling dust appears in a routine image that Opportunity took with its panoramic camera on July 15. The rover took the image in the drive direction, east-southeastward, right after a drive of about 70 meters (230 feet). The image was taken for use in planning the next drive.

"This is the first dust devil seen by Opportunity," said Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University, College Station, a member of the rover science team. Spirit's area, inside Gusev Crater, is rougher in ground texture, and dustier, than the area where Opportunity is working in the Meridiani Planum region. Those factors at Gusev allow vortices of wind to form more readily and raise more dust, compared to conditions at Meridiani, Lemmon explained. Orbiters have photographed tracks left by dust devils near Opportunity, but the tracks are scarcer there than near Spirit.

Swirling winds at Meridiani may be more common than visible signs of them, if the winds occur where there is no loose dust to disturb. Just one day before Opportunity captured the dust devil image, wind cleaned some of the dust off the rover's solar array, increasing electricity output from the array by more than 10 percent. "That might have just been a coincidence, but there could be a connection," Lemmon said. The team is resuming systematic checks for afternoon dust devils with Opportunity's navigation camera, for the first time in about three years.

NASA Announces Three New Centennial Challenges

NASA announced three new Centennial Challenges Tuesday, with an overall prize purse of $5 million. NASA's Centennial Challenges are prize competitions for technological achievements by independent teams who work without government funding. "NASA sponsors prize competitions because the agency believes student teams, private companies of all sizes and citizen-inventors can provide creative solutions to problems of interest to NASA and the nation," said Bobby Braun, the agency's chief technologist.

"Prize competitions are a proven way to foster technological competitiveness, new industries and innovation across America." The Nano Satellite Launch Challenge is to place a small satellite into Earth orbit, twice in one week, with a prize of $2 million. The goals of this challenge are to stimulate innovations in low-cost launch technology and encourage creation of commercial nano-satellite delivery services. The Night Rover Challenge is to demonstrate a solar-powered exploration vehicle that can operate in darkness using its own stored energy. The prize purse is $1.5 million.

The objective is to stimulate innovations in energy storage technologies of value in extreme space environments, such as the surface of the moon, or for electric vehicles and renewable energy systems on Earth. The Sample Return Robot Challenge is to demonstrate a robot that can locate and retrieve geologic samples from wide and varied terrain without human control. This challenge has a prize purse of $1.5 million. The objectives are to encourage innovations in automatic navigation and robotic manipulator technologies.