NASA Sees Soudelor Reach Category 5 Typhoon Status

NASA - Aqua Mission logo / NASA - ISS-RapidScat logo.

Aug. 4, 2015

Soudelor (Northwestern Pacific Ocean)

NASA's Aqua satellite and RapidScat instrument analyzed Super typhoon Soudelor's extent and winds as it reached Category Five typhoon status on the Saffir-Simpson Wind Scale.

Image above: On Aug. 4, 2015, at 4:10 UTC (12:10 a.m. EDT) the MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured this visible-light image of Super typhoon Soudelor. Image Credits: NASA Goddard's MODIS Rapid Response Team.

RapidScat is a NASA instrument that flies aboard the International Space Station. RapidScat gathered surface wind speed and direction data on Soudelor on Aug. 3 at 1900 UTC (3 p.m. EDT) when it just west of Mariana Islands. RapidScat measured saw the strongest sustained winds circled the center. Sustained winds at that time were near 135 knots (155 mph/250 kph).

On Aug. 4 at 4:10 UTC (12:10 a.m. EDT) the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible-light image of Super typhoon Soudelor that clearly showed its 12-nautical-mile-wide eye. Thick bands of powerful thunderstorms surrounded the storm and spiraled into the center.

Image above: RapidScat gathered wind speed and direction data on Soudelor on Aug. 3, 2015, at 1900 UTC (3 p.m. EDT) just west of Mariana Islands. RapidScat measure sustained winds around the center at more than 36 meters per second/70 knots/80.5 mph/129.6 kph). Image Credits: NASA JPL, Doug Tyler.

At 0900 (5 a.m. EDT), Super typhoon Soudelor had maximum sustained winds near 140 knots (161.1 mph/ 259.3 kph). Those typhoon-force winds stretched out up to 40 miles from the center, while tropical-storm-force winds extended 185 miles from the center. The Joint Typhoon Warning Center expects the storm to maintain that intensity for another 24 hours.

ISS-RapidScat in action. Animation Credit: NASA

Soudelor was located near 18.6 North latitude and 138.8. East longitude, about 750 nautical miles (863 miles/1,389 km) from Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, Japan. Soudelor was moving to the west-northwest at 13 knots (14.9 mph/24.0 kph).

This super typhoon was generating extremely rough seas, with maximum significant wave height to 48 feet (14.6 meters)!

The Joint Typhoon Warning Center forecast takes Soudelor on a west-northwesterly path near the Japanese island of Ishigakijima on August 7 and then over northern Taiwan before making landfall in southeastern China on August 8.

Artist's view of Aqua satellite. Image Credit: NASA

The storm is predicted to weaken as it continues on its trek to the west-northwest. Interests in the path of this Super typhoon should prepare for storm surge, heavy rainfall, mudslides in high terrain areas, and typhoon-force winds.

For forecast warnings from the Japan Meteorological Agency, visit:  http://www.jma.go.jp/jma/indexe.html. For warnings and watches for Taiwan, visit the Central Weather Bureau website: http://www.cwb.gov.tw/eng/. For warnings in China, visit the China Meteorological Administration website: http://www.cma.gov.cn/en.

For more information about ISS-RapidScat, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/1067.html

For more information about Aqua satellite mission, visit: http://aqua.nasa.gov/

Images (mentioned), Animation (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Rob Gutro.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Looking Up to the Giant

NASA - Cassini Mission To Saturn patch.

Aug. 4, 2015

Thanks to the illumination angle, Mimas (right) and Dione (left) appear to be staring up at a giant Saturn looming in the background.

Although certainly large enough to be noticeable, moons like Mimas (246 miles or 396 kilometers across) and Dione (698 miles or 1123 kilometers across) are tiny compared to Saturn (75,400 miles or 120,700 kilometers across). Even the enormous moon Titan (3,200 miles or 5,150 kilometers across) is dwarfed by the giant planet.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about one degree of the ring plane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on May 27, 2015 using a spectral filter which preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 728 nanometers.

The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 634,000 miles (one million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 85 degrees. Image scale is 38 miles (61 kilometers) per pixel.

Cassini Spacecraft Animation

The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov or http://www.nasa.gov/cassini . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org and http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Cassini-Huygens

Image, Video, Text, Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Tony Greicius.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot: A Swirling Mystery

NASA - Goddard Space Flight Center logo.

Aug. 4, 2015

The largest and most powerful hurricanes ever recorded on Earth spanned over 1,000 miles across with winds gusting up to around 200 mph. That’s wide enough to stretch across nearly all U.S. states east of Texas. But even that kind of storm is dwarfed by the Great Red Spot, a gigantic storm in Jupiter. There, gigantic means twice as wide as Earth.

With tumultuous winds peaking at about 400 mph, the Great Red Spot has been swirling wildly over Jupiter’s skies for the past 150 years—maybe even much longer than that. While people saw a big spot in Jupiter as early as they started stargazing through telescopes in the 1600s, it is still unclear whether they were looking at a different storm. Today, scientists know the Great Red Spot is there and it’s been there for a while, but they still struggle to learn what causes its swirl of reddish hues.

Image above: Trapped between two jet streams, the Great Red Spot is an anticyclone swirling around a center of high atmospheric pressure that makes it rotate in the opposite sense of hurricanes on Earth. Image Credit: NASA.

Understanding the Great Red Spot is not easy, and it’s mostly Jupiter’s fault. A planet a thousand times as big as Earth, Jupiter consists mostly of gas. A liquid ocean of hydrogen surrounds its core, and the atmosphere consists mostly of hydrogen and helium. That translates into no solid ground like we have on Earth to weaken storms. Also, Jupiter’s clouds obstruct clear observations of its lower atmosphere. While some studies of Jupiter have investigated areas in its lower atmosphere, orbiting probes and telescopes studying the Great Red Spot can only see clouds scattered high in the atmosphere.

Amy Simon, an expert in planetary atmospheres at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said learning more about Jupiter and its Great Red Spot could help scientists understand Earth’s weather system better. Jupiter’s weather functions under the same physics as Earth, she said, just millions of miles farther from the sun. Simon also said Jupiter studies could improve our understandings of worlds beyond our solar system. “If you just look at reflected light from an extrasolar planet, you’re not going to be able to tell what it’s made of,” Simon said. “Looking at as many possible different cases in our own solar system could enable us to then apply that knowledge to extrasolar planets.”

Studies predict Jupiter’s upper atmosphere has clouds consisting of ammonia, ammonium hydrosulfide, and water. Still, scientists don’t know exactly how or even whether these chemicals react to give colors like those in the Great Red Spot. Plus, these compounds make up only a small part of the atmosphere. “We’re talking about something that only makes up a really tiny portion of the atmosphere,” Simon said. “That’s what makes it so hard to figure out exactly what makes the colors that we see.”

Close-up view of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. Image Credit: NASA

Like Simon, other scientists at Goddard work to shed light on the Great Red Spot’s mystery. Goddard scientists Mark Loeffler and Reggie Hudson have been performing laboratory studies to investigate whether cosmic rays, one type of radiation that strikes Jupiter’s clouds, can chemically alter ammonium hydrosulfide to produce new compounds that could explain the spot’s color.

Ammonium hydrosulfide is unstable under Earth’s atmospheric conditions, so Loeffler makes his own batch by heating hydrogen sulfide and ammonia together. He then blasts them with charged particles, similar to the cosmic rays impacting Jupiter’s clouds. “Our first step is to try to identify what forms when ammonium hydrosulfide is irradiated,” Loeffler said.  “We have recently finished identifying these new products, and now we are trying to correlate what we have learned with the colors in Jupiter. ”

Other experts agree with the leading theory that deep under Jupiter’s clouds, a colorless ammonium hydrosulfide layer could be reacting with cosmic rays or UV radiation from the sun. But Simon said many chemicals turn red under different situations. “That’s the problem,” she said. “Is it turning the right color red?” Under the right conditions, ammonium hydrosulfide might be.

With the Great Red Spot and other reddish parts of Jupiter, coloring may result from multiple factors, as opposed to just ammonium hydrosulfide. “Ideally, what you’d want is a mixture with the right components of everything that you see in Jupiter’s atmosphere at the right temperature, and then irradiate it at the right levels,” Simon said. Ultimately, Simon and Loeffler said solving the Great Red Spot’s mystery will take more experiments combining chemicals under the right temperatures, light exposures and radiation doses. “What we are trying to do is design lab experiments more realistic to Jupiter’s atmosphere,” Simon said. 

Funded by NASA’s Planetary Atmospheres and Outer Planets programs, Loeffler, Simon and Hudson’s research is scheduled to appear in the journal Icarus later this year. New Mexico State University astronomer Nancy Chanover also takes part in their studies.

For facts and figures on Jupiter, visit:
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Jupiter

Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Roberto Molar Candanosa/Karl Hille.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

First MSG-4 image

ESA - MGS-4 logo.

August 4, 2015

MSG-4, Europe’s latest weather satellite, delivers first image

Today, the Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager instrument on MSG-4 captured its first image of Earth. This demonstrates that Europe’s latest geostationary weather satellite, launched on 15 July, is performing well and is on its way to becoming fully operational when needed after six months of commissioning.

ESA was responsible for the initial operations after launch (the so-called launch and early orbit phase) of MSG-4 and handed over the satellite to EUMETSAT on 26 July.

MSG-4 satellite

The first image is a joint achievement by ESA, EUMETSAT and European space industry. For its mandatory programmes, EUMETSAT relies on ESA to develop new satellites and procure the recurrent satellites like MSG-4. This cooperation model has made Europe a world leader in satellite meteorology by making best use of the two agencies’ expertise. 

Read full press release: http://www.esa.int/For_Media/Press_Releases/MSG-4_Europe_s_latest_weather_satellite_delivers_first_image

ESA - MSG overview / Meteosat Second Generation: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/Meteosat_Second_Generation/MSG_overview2

Related article:

Ariane 5 orbits Star One C4 and MSG-4: http://orbiterchspacenews.blogspot.ch/2015/07/ariane-5-orbits-star-one-c4-and-msg-4.html

Images, Text, Credits: ESA/Eumetsat.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Tracking A Mysterious Group of Asteroid Outcasts

NASA - NEO WISE logo.

August 4, 2015

Fast Facts:

- A new NASA study has traced some members of the near-Earth asteroid population back to their likely source.

- The source may be the Euphrosyne family of dark, asteroids on highly inclined (or tilted) orbits in the outer asteroid belt.

- The study used data from NASA's NEOWISE space telescope, which has a second life following its reactivation in 2013.

High above the plane of our solar system, near the asteroid-rich abyss between Mars and Jupiter, scientists have found a unique family of space rocks. These interplanetary oddballs are the Euphrosyne (pronounced you-FROH-seh-nee) asteroids, and by any measure they have been distant, dark and mysterious -- until now.

Image above: The asteroid Euphrosyne glides across a field of background stars in this time-lapse view from NASA's WISE spacecraft.

Distributed at the outer edge of the asteroid belt, the Euphrosynes have an unusual orbital path that juts well above the ecliptic, the equator of the solar system. The asteroid after which they are named, Euphrosyne -- for an ancient Greek goddess of mirth -- is about 156 miles (260 kilometers) across and is one of the 10 largest asteroids in the main belt. Current-day Euphrosyne is thought to be a remnant of a massive collision about 700 million years ago that formed the family of smaller asteroids bearing its name. Scientists think this event was one of the last great collisions in the solar system.

A new study conducted by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, used the agency's orbiting Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) telescope to look at these unusual asteroids to learn more about Near Earth Objects, or NEOs, and their potential threat to Earth.

NEOs are bodies whose orbits around the sun approach the orbit of Earth; this population is short-lived on astronomical timescales and is fed by other reservoirs of bodies in our solar system. As they orbit the sun, NEOs can occasionally have close approaches to Earth. For this reason alone -- the safety of our home planet -- the study of such objects is important.

As a result of their study, the JPL researchers believe the Euphrosynes may be the source of some of the dark NEOs found to be on long, highly inclined orbits. They found that, through gravitational interactions with Saturn, Euphrosyne asteroids can evolve into NEOs over timescales of millions of years.

NEOs can originate in either the asteroid belt or the more distant outer reaches of the solar system. Those from the asteroid belt are thought to evolve toward Earth's orbit through collisions and the gravitational influence of the planets. Originating well above the ecliptic and near the far edge of the asteroid belt, the forces that shape their trajectories toward Earth are far more moderate.

"The Euphrosynes have a gentle resonance with the orbit of Saturn that slowly moves these objects, eventually turning some of them into NEOs," said Joseph Masiero, JPL's lead scientist on the Euphrosynes study. "This particular gravitational resonance tends to push some of the larger fragments of the Euphrosyne family into near-Earth space."

By studying the Euphrosyne family asteroids with NEOWISE, JPL scientists have been able to measure their sizes and the amount of solar energy they reflect. Since NEOWISE operates in the infrared portion of the spectrum, it detects heat. Therefore, it can see dark objects far better than telescopes operating at visible wavelengths, which sense reflected sunlight. Its heat-sensing capability also allows it to measure sizes more accurately.

The 1,400 Euphrosyne asteroids studied by Masiero and his colleagues turned out to be large and dark, with highly inclined and elliptical orbits. These traits make them good candidates for the source of some of the dark NEOs the NEOWISE telescope detects and discovers, particularly those that also have highly inclined orbits.

WISE Reactivated to Hunt for Asteroids

NEOWISE was originally launched as an astrophysics mission in 2009 as the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. It operated until 2011 and was then shut down. But the spacecraft, now dubbed NEOWISE, would get a second life. "NEOWISE is a great tool for searching for near-Earth asteroids, particularly high-inclination, dark objects," Masiero said.

There are over 700,000 asteroidal bodies currently known in the main belt that range in size from large boulders to about 60 percent of the diameter of Earth's moon, with many yet to be discovered. This makes finding the specific point of origin of most NEOs extremely difficult.

With the Euphrosynes it's different. "Most near-Earth objects come from a number of sources in the inner region of the main belt, and they are quickly mixed around," Masiero said. "But with objects coming from this family, in such a unique region, we are able to draw a likely path for some of the unusual, dark NEOs we find back to the collision in which they were born."

A better understanding of the origins and behaviors of these mysterious objects will give researchers a clearer picture of asteroids in general, and in particular the NEOs that skirt our home planet's neighborhood. Such studies are important, and potentially critical, to the future of humanity, which is a primary reason JPL and its partners continue to relentlessly track these wanderers within our solar system. To date, U.S. assets have discovered more than 98 percent of the known NEOs.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages the NEOWISE mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, built the science instrument. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colorado, built the spacecraft. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

NASA's Near-Earth Object Program at NASA Headquarters, Washington, manages and funds the search, study and monitoring of asteroids and comets whose orbits periodically bring them close to Earth. JPL manages the Near-Earth Object Office for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information about NEOWISE, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/neowise

More information about asteroids and near-Earth objects is available at: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroidwatch

Images, Text, Credits: NASA/JPL/DC Agle.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

Streaming Push and Pull

NASA - Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) patch.

Aug. 3, 2015

Elongated streams of plasma zipped back and forth along magnetic field lines above several active regions on the sun on July 26-27, 2015. This kind of activity is rather common, but interesting to watch up close as the streams of particles twist and turn and zip back and forth.

Streaming Push and Pull

The images were taken of ionized Helium heated to 60,000 degrees C. in 304 wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light.

For more information about Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), visit: http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Image, Video, Text, Credits: NASA/Solar Dynamics Observatory/Steele Hill.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Fly over Atlantis Chaos

ESA - Mars Express Mission patch.

August 3, 2015

Ancient Atlantis

Mars is peppered with craters. Scientists have deduced that the red planet is struck by around 200 meteoroids every year that dig out new craters.

While some small craters are fresh, Mars has a great many that are much larger and more ancient, such as the roughly circular patch of terrain, partially encircled by wrinkled cliffs, shown at the centre of this image. Named Atlantis basin, this crater is so old that its outer rim has eroded and is now barely detectable. It is thought to be the result of a massive collision some 4 billion years ago, during the ‘Late Heavy Bombardment’ – a period when an unusually high number of asteroids rained down on the rocky inner Solar System planets.

The Atlantis basin is located in the southern highlands of Mars. Many different structures and geological features can be found across this region of the planet, a number of which are shown in this image such as cliffs, impact craters, channels carved into steep slopes, wrinkled ridges and scarps.

Perhaps the most prominent feature is the speckling of uneven terrain towards the centre of this image. This is Atlantis Chaos, a lowland plain covering around 170 km by 145 km, and containing a few hundred small peaks and flat-topped hills known as ‘mesas’. These sandy-coloured mounds are thought to result from the slow erosion of a once-continuous solid plateau.

Mars Express

There are several other large basins in this part of Mars that appear to be partially connected. Geologists believe that these basins may have been filled with water in the past to create the hypothetical far-reaching Eridania lake, which would have covered an area of over a million square kilometres, about the size of France and Spain combined.

There is also evidence from Mars Express and other spacecraft that deposits in one of these nearby basins contain minerals that are produced in the presence of water, and are similar to those found in some types of clay on Earth. This, along with the deep channels and ridges carved into the basin slopes seen towards the bottom of this image, for example, suggest the past existence of water in the Atlantis basin and surrounding region.

This image is a mosaic of four images taken by the Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera on 28 December 2008, 29 December 2008, 6 February 2009 and 5 January 2014. The image resolution is roughly 14 m per pixel.

Chaos in Atlantis basin

This colourful image is a topography map of a portion of the region known as Terra Sirenum, located in the southern hemisphere of Mars. The map is colour-coded, with reds and whites representing the highest topography and blues and purples the lowest.

The images shows a myriad of terrain types including cliffs, impact craters, channels carved into steep slopes, wrinkled ridges and scarps, which together reflect a rich geological history.

Perhaps the most prominent feature is the portion of uneven chaotic terrain towards the centre of the image. This is Atlantis Chaos, a lowland plain covering around 170 km by 145 km and containing a few hundred small peaks and flat-topped hills. They are thought to result from the slow erosion of a once-continuous solid plateau.

A number of impact craters occupy the scene and span a range of ages, with the most ancient with almost undetectable rims that have eroded over time. Indeed, the outline of the giant Atlantis Basin is hard to see, but lies at the centre of the image and spans over 200 km. It is connected to another large basin located further south (left) with a diameter of 175 km.

Scientists suspect that some of the craters and basins in this area may have once contained standing water. Indeed, channels carved into the slopes of the ancient basins provide evidence for the existence of water in this region’s past.

This image is a mosaic of four images taken by the Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera on 28 December 2008, 29 December 2008, 6 February 2009 and 5 January 2014. The image resolution is roughly 14 m per pixel.

Flight over Atlantis Chaos

Video above: Explore the Atlantis Chaos region of Mars, in the Red Planet’s southern hemisphere. The video showcases a myriad of features that reflect a rich geological history. The tour takes in rugged cliffs and impact craters, alongside parts of ancient shallow, eroded basins.

See smooth plains scarred with wrinkled ridges, scarps and fracture lines that point to influence from tectonic activity. Marvel at ‘chaotic’ terrain – hundreds of small peaks and flat-topped hills that are thought to result from the slow erosion of a once-continuous solid plateau. This entire region may once have played host to vast volumes of water – look out for the evidence in the form of channels carved into steep-sided walls.

Related links:

Looking at Mars: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Mars_Express

High Resolution Stereo Camera: http://berlinadmin.dlr.de/Missions/express/indexeng.shtml

Behind the lens...: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Mars_Express/Behind_the_lens

Frequently asked questions: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Mars_Express/Frequently_asked_questions

ESA Planetary Science archive (PSA): http://www.rssd.esa.int/PSA

NASA Planetary Data System: http://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/missions/mars_express/hrsc.htm

HRSC data viewer: http://hrscview.fu-berlin.de/

In depth:

Mars Express in depth: http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/area/index.cfm?fareaid=9

Mars Express top 10 discoveries: http://sci.esa.int/jump.cfm?oid=51820

Images, Video, Text, Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGA).

Greetings, Orbiter.ch