Earth-Directed Coronal Mass Ejection From the Sun

ESA / NASA - Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) / ESA / NASA - Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) patch.

March 15, 2013

Images above:The ESA and NASA Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) captured these images of the sun spitting out a coronal mass ejection (CME) on March 15, 2013, from 3:24 to 4:00 a.m. EDT. This type of image is known as a coronagraph, since a disk is placed over the sun to better see the dimmer atmosphere around it, called the corona. Credit: ESA & NASA/SOHO.

On March 15, 2013, at 2:54 a.m. EDT, the sun erupted with an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection (CME), a solar phenomenon that can send billions of tons of solar particles into space and can reach Earth one to three days later and affect electronic systems in satellites and on the ground. Experimental NASA research models, based on observations from the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) and ESA/NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, show that the CME left the sun at speeds of around 900 miles per second, which is a fairly fast speed for CMEs. Historically, CMEs at this speed have caused mild to moderate effects at Earth.

ESA / NASA - Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecrafts. Credit: ESA & NASA

The NASA research models also show that the CME may pass by the Spitzer and Messenger spacecraft. NASA has notified their mission operators. There is, however, only minor particle radiation associated with this event, which is what would normally concern operators of interplanetary spacecraft since the particles can trip on board computer electronics.

ESA / NASA - Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft. Credit: ESA & NASA

Not to be confused with a solar flare, a CME is a solar phenomenon that can send solar particles into space and reach Earth one to three days later. Earth-directed CMEs can cause a space weather phenomenon called a geomagnetic storm, which occurs when they connect with the outside of the Earth's magnetic envelope, the magnetosphere, for an extended period of time. In the past, geomagnetic storms caused by CMEs such as this one have usually been of mild to medium strength.

NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center (http://swpc.noaa.gov) is the United States Government official source for space weather forecasts, alerts, watches and warnings. Updates will be provided if needed.

 Active Region Release Two CMEs

Video above: Solar material can be seen blowing off the sun in this video captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) on the night of Feb. 5, 2013. This active region on the sun sent out two coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that night. Credit: NASA/SDO.

What is a CME?

For answers to this and other space weather questions, please visit the Spaceweather Frequently Asked Questions page: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/spaceweather/index.html

Related Link:

View Past Solar Activity: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/multimedia/Solar-Events.html

Images (mentioned), Video (mentioned), Text, Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center / Karen C. Fox.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Expedition 34 Crew Lands Safely

ROSCOSMOS - Soyuz TMA-06M Mission patch.

March 15, 2013

Expedition 34 Safely Land & Egress Soyuz TMA-06M

Expedition 34 Commander Kevin Ford and Flight Engineers Evgeny Tarelkin and Oleg Novitskiy landed their Soyuz TMA-06M spacecraft in the steppe of Kazakhstan, northeast of the remote town of Arkalyk Friday evening. Russian recovery teams were on hand to help the crew exit the Soyuz vehicle and adjust to gravity after 144 days in space.

The trio launched aboard the Soyuz TMA-06M spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in October and spent 142 days living and working aboard the International Space Station.

Novitskiy was at the controls of the spacecraft as it undocked at 7:43 p.m. from the Poisk Mini-Research Module 2.

Soyuz TMA-06M undocking

The undocking marks the end of Expedition 34 and the start of Expedition 35 under the command of Canadian Space Agency astronaut Chris Hadfield, who is scheduled to remain on the station with Flight Engineers Tom Marshburn and Roman Romanenko until May. Ford ceremonially handed command of the station over to Hadfield on Wednesday. Hadfield, Marshburn and Romanenko arrived at the station aboard the Soyuz TMA-07M spacecraft in December 2012.

Expedition 34 Crew safely landed

Hadfield, Marshburn and Romanenko will remain aboard the orbiting complex as a three-person crew until the March 28 launch and docking of Expedition 35 Flight Engineers Chris Cassidy, Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin.

For more information about International Space Station (ISS), visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html

Read more about Expedition 35: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition35/index.html

Images, Video, Text, Credits: NASA / NASA TV / ROSCOSMOS / ROSCOSMOS TV.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

Expedition 34 Crew Heads Home

ROSCOSMOS - Soyuz TMA-06M Mission patch / ISS - Expedition 34 Mission patch.

March 15, 2013

Image above: Expedition 34 Soyuz Commander Oleg Novitskiy (center) says goodbye to the three station residents staying behind moments before closing the hatches. Credit: NASA TV.

Expedition 34 Commander Kevin Ford and Flight Engineers Evgeny Tarelkin and Oleg Novitskiy undocked from the International Space Station in the Soyuz TMA-06M spacecraft at 7:43 p.m. EDT Thursday, wrapping up 142 days aboard the orbiting outpost.

Expedition 34 Says Goodbye and Undocks

After performing a deorbit burn, the Soyuz will be on track for a scheduled 11:05 p.m. landing in the steppe of Kazakhstan, northeast of the remote town of Arkalyk, wrapping up 144 days in space for the three. The crew members bid farewell to one another and closed the hatches between the two spacecraft at 4:38 p.m.

NASA TV coverage of deorbit and landing begins at 9:45 p.m. and will continue until the crew is safely in the medical tent at the landing site.

Three members of the Expedition 34 crew pose for some photographs in their Sokol suits in the Destiny lab. Credit: NASA.

The undocking marks the end of Expedition 34 and the start of Expedition 35 under the command of Canadian Space Agency astronaut Chris Hadfield, who is scheduled to remain on the station with Flight Engineers Tom Marshburn and Roman Romanenko until May. Ford ceremonially handed command of the station over to Hadfield on Wednesday. Hadfield, Marshburn and Romanenko arrived at the station aboard the Soyuz TMA-07M spacecraft in December 2012.

Soyuz TMA-06M spacecraft docked at ISS. Credit: NASA TV

Watch the change of command ceremony: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=160978461

Hadfield, Marshburn and Romanenko will remain aboard the orbiting complex as a three-person crew until the March 28 launch and docking of Expedition 35 Flight Engineers Chris Cassidy, Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin.

Read more about Expedition 35: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition35/index.html

Images, Video, Text, Credits: NASA / NASA TV / ROSCOSMOS / ROSCOSMOS TV.

Cheers, Orbiter.ch

Panorama From NASA Mars Rover Shows Mount Sharp

NASA - Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) patch.

March 15, 2013

This mosaic of images from the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity shows Mount Sharp in a white-balanced color adjustment that makes the sky look overly blue but shows the terrain as if under Earth-like lighting. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.

Rising above the present location of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, higher than any mountain in the 48 contiguous states of the United States, Mount Sharp is featured in new imagery from the rover.

A pair of mosaics assembled from dozens of telephoto images shows Mount Sharp in dramatic detail. The component images were taken by the 100-millimeter-focal-length telephoto lens camera mounted on the right side of Curiosity's remote sensing mast, during the 45th Martian day of the rover's mission on Mars (Sept. 20, 2012).

This layered mound, also called Aeolis Mons, in the center of Gale Crater rises more than 3 miles (5 kilometers) above the crater floor location of Curiosity. Lower slopes of Mount Sharp remain a destination for the mission, though the rover will first spend many more weeks around a location called "Yellowknife Bay," where it has found evidence of a past environment favorable for microbial life.

This mosaic of images from the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity shows Mount Sharp in raw color as recorded by the camera. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.

A version of the mosaic that has been white-balanced to show the terrain as if under Earthlike lighting, which makes the sky look overly blue, is at http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA16768 . White-balanced versions help scientists recognize rock materials based on their terrestrial experience. The Martian sky would look like more of a butterscotch color to the human eye. A version of the mosaic with raw color, as a typical smart-phone camera would show the scene, is at http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA16769 . The white-balanced and raw images are both available with pan and zoom functionality on GigaPan at http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/125627 and http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/125628, respectively.

In both versions, the sky has been filled out by extrapolating color and brightness information from the portions of the sky that were captured in images of the terrain.

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory project is using Curiosity and the rover's 10 science instruments to investigate environmental history within Gale Crater, a location where the project has found that conditions were long ago favorable for microbial life.

Mars Science Laboratory (MSL). Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, built and operates the Mast Camera (Mastcam) instrument. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory mission for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington, and built the rover.

For more information about the mission, visit http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl .

Follow the mission on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .

Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA / JPL / Guy Webster.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

'Hot Spots' Ride a Merry-Go-Round on Jupiter

NASA / ESA - Cassini Mission to Saturn patch.

March 14, 2013

Jupiter's Hot Spots

NASA postdoctoral fellow David Choi discusses his study of dark features in Jupiter's atmosphere called "hot spots," and their connection to large-scale atmospheric waves. Video credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Cassini Mission Team, NASA JPL.

 In the swirling canopy of Jupiter's atmosphere, cloudless patches are so exceptional that the big ones get the special name "hot spots." Exactly how these clearings form and why they're only found near the planet’s equator have long been mysteries. Now, using images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, scientists have found new evidence that hot spots in Jupiter's atmosphere are created by a Rossby wave, a pattern also seen in Earth's atmosphere and oceans. The team found the wave responsible for the hot spots glides up and down through layers of the atmosphere like a carousel horse on a merry-go-round.

"This is the first time anybody has closely tracked the shape of multiple hot spots over a period of time, which is the best way to appreciate the dynamic nature of these features," said the study's lead author, David Choi, a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The paper is published online in the April issue of the journal Icarus.

Choi and his colleagues made time-lapse movies from hundreds of observations taken by Cassini during its flyby of Jupiter in late 2000, when the spacecraft made its closest approach to the planet. The movies zoom in on a line of hot spots between one of Jupiter's dark belts and bright white zones, roughly 7 degrees north of the equator. Covering about two months (in Earth time), the study examines the daily and weekly changes in the sizes and shapes of the hot spots, each of which covers more area than North America, on average.

The dark hot spot in this false-color image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft is a window deep into Jupiter's atmosphere. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/GSFC.

Much of what scientists know about hot spots came from NASA's Galileo mission, which released an atmospheric probe that descended into a hot spot in 1995. This was the first, and so far only, in-situ investigation of Jupiter’s atmosphere.

"Galileo's probe data and a handful of orbiter images hinted at the complex winds swirling around and through these hot spots, and raised questions about whether they fundamentally were waves, cyclones or something in between," said Ashwin Vasavada, a paper co-author who is based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and who was a member of the Cassini imaging team during the Jupiter flyby. "Cassini's fantastic movies now show the entire life cycle and evolution of hot spots in great detail."

Because hot spots are breaks in the clouds, they provide windows into a normally unseen layer of Jupiter's atmosphere, possibly all the way down to the level where water clouds can form. In pictures, hot spots appear shadowy, but because the deeper layers are warmer, hot spots are very bright at the infrared wavelengths where heat is sensed; in fact, this is how they got their name.

In this series of images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, a dark, rectangular hot spot (top) interacts with a line of vortices that approaches from on the upper-right side (second panel). The interaction distorts the shape of the hot spot (third panel), leaving it diminished (bottom). Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/GSFC.

One hypothesis is that hot spots occur when big drafts of air sink in the atmosphere and get heated or dried out in the process. But the surprising regularity of hot spots has led some researchers to suspect there is an atmospheric wave involved. Typically, eight to 10 hot spots line up, roughly evenly spaced, with dense white plumes of cloud in between. This pattern could be explained by a wave that pushes cold air down, breaking up any clouds, and then carries warm air up, causing the heavy cloud cover seen in the plumes. Computer modeling has strengthened this line of reasoning.

From the Cassini movies, the researchers mapped the winds in and around each hot spot and plume, and examined interactions with vortices that pass by, in addition to wind gyres, or spiraling vortices, that merge with the hot spots. To separate these motions from the jet stream in which the hot spots reside, the scientists also tracked the movements of small "scooter" clouds, similar to cirrus clouds on Earth. This provided what may be the first direct measurement of the true wind speed of the jet stream, which was clocked at about 300 to 450 mph (500 to 720 kilometers per hour) -- much faster than anyone previously thought. The hot spots amble at the more leisurely pace of about 225 mph (362 kilometers per hour).

By teasing out these individual movements, the researchers saw that the motions of the hot spots fit the pattern of a Rossby wave in the atmosphere. On Earth, Rossby waves play a major role in weather. For example, when a blast of frigid Arctic air suddenly dips down and freezes Florida's crops, a Rossby wave is interacting with the polar jet stream and sending it off its typical course. The wave travels around our planet but periodically wanders north and south as it goes.

The wave responsible for the hot spots also circles the planet west to east, but instead of wandering north and south, it glides up and down in the atmosphere. The researchers estimate this wave may rise and fall 15 to 30 miles (24 to 50 kilometers) in altitude.

 Cassini Jupiter flyby. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech

The new findings should help researchers understand how well the observations returned by the Galileo probe extend to the rest of Jupiter's atmosphere. "And that is another step in answering more of the questions that still surround hot spots on Jupiter," said Choi.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency. The mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

For more information on Cassini, visit http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Cassini-Huygens

Images (mentioned), Video (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center / Elizabeth Zubritsky / JPL / Jia-Rui Cook.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

NASA’s SDO Observes Earth, Lunar Transits in Same Day

NASA - Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) patch.

March 14, 2013

Left: The view of the sun is partially obscured by Earth as seen by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory on Mar. 11, 2013, at 2:20 a.m. EDT. Credit: NASA/SDO.

Right: This image from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory on Mar. 11, 2013, at 8:00 a.m. EDT, shows the moon crossing in front of the sun. Credit: NASA/SDO.

On March 2, 2013, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) entered its semiannual eclipse season, a period of three weeks when Earth blocks its view of the sun for a period of time each day. On March 11, however, SDO was treated to two transits. Earth blocked SDO’s view of the sun from about 2:15 to 3:45 a.m. EDT. Later in the same day, from around 7:30 to 8:45 a.m. EDT, the moon moved in front of the sun for a partial eclipse.

When Earth blocks the sun, the boundaries of Earth’s shadow appear fuzzy, since SDO can see some light from the sun coming through Earth’s atmosphere. The line of Earth appears almost straight, since Earth -- from SDO’s point of view -- is so large compared to the sun.

The eclipse caused by the moon looks far different. Since the moon has no atmosphere, its curved shape can be seen clearly, and the line of its shadow is crisp and clean. Any spacecraft observing the sun from an orbit around Earth has to contend with such eclipses, but SDO's orbit is designed to minimize them as much as possible, with only two three-week eclipse seasons each year. The 2013 spring eclipse season continues until March 26. The fall season will begin on Sept. 2.

For more information about SDO, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sdo/main/index.html

Images (mentioned), Text, Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / Karen C. Fox.

Cheers, Orbiter.ch

Sun Spits Out Two CMEs

NASA / ESA - SOHO Mission patch.

March 14, 2013

ESA and NASA’s Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) captured this image of a coronal mass ejection bursting off the leftside of the image at 9:25 p.m. EDT on March 12, 2013. This sun itself is obscured in this image, called a coronagraph, in order to better see the dimmer structures around it. Credit: ESA&NASA/SOHO.

The sun recently erupted with two coronal mass ejections (CMEs). One began at 8:36 p.m. EDT on March 12, 2013 and is directed toward three NASA spacecraft, Spitzer, Kepler and Epoxi. There is, however, no particle radiation associated with this event, which is what would normally concern operators of interplanetary spacecraft since the particles can trip computer electronics on board. A second CME began at 6:54 a.m. EDT on March 13, 2013 and its flank may pass by Earth at a speed that does not typically have a significant impact at Earth.

Experimental NASA research models, based on observations from the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) and ESA/NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, indicate that both CMEs left the sun at around 400 miles per second, which is a fairly typical speed for CMEs.

Not to be confused with a solar flare, a CME is a solar phenomenon that can send solar particles into space and reach Earth one to three days later.

Earth-directed CMEs can cause a space weather phenomenon called a geomagnetic storm, which occurs when they connect with the outside of Earth's magnetic envelope, the magnetosphere, for an extended period of time. In the past, geomagnetic storms from CMEs of this speed are usually mild. CMEs such as this have caused auroras near the poles but are unlikely to disrupt electrical systems on Earth or interfere with GPS or satellite-based communications systems.

NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center (http://swpc.noaa.gov) is the United States Government official source for space weather forecasts, alerts, watches and warnings. Updates will be provided if needed.

What is a CME?

For answers to this and other space weather questions, please visit the Spaceweather Frequently Asked Questions page: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/spaceweather/index.html

Related Link:

View Past Solar Activity: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/multimedia/Solar-Events.html

Image (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center / Karen C. Fox.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch