The US Naval Research Laboratory is proposing to encircle the Earth with tungsten dust in an attempt to bring down dangerous space junk

Space junk is a serious problem, particularly in some orbits where debris is increasing at alarming rates.

While there are some 900 active satellites orbiting the Earth, there are 19,000 bits of junk larger than 10 cm across. This stuff is big enough to be tracked and catalogued on the ground so that operational satellites can move away if it becomes a threat.

But it's the smaller stuff that represents a more insidious threat since it cannot be seen and therefore can't be avoided. Most experts agree that there's at least an order of magnitude more of this small stuff than large bits up there.

So what to do? Various organisations have suggested ways of minimising junk, such as reducing the amount of deliberately jettisoned junk such as lens caps, and by deorbiting defunct satellites or moving them into safe orbits using space tugs.

But these measures will only help reduce the amount of big junk. The smaller stuff is much harder to clean up.

There is a natural process that can help. Below 900km, the Earth's atmosphere generates a small but significant amount drag, which deorbits small junk in 25 years or less. So here the orbits are naturally flushed clean. But above 900km, the life time of junk stretches into centuries.

Today, Gurudas Ganguli at the US Naval Research Laboratory and a few pals describe a novel way of getting it down.

Their idea is to increase the drag on the stuff above 900 km so that their orbits decay more rapidly. That sounds perfectly sensible but their method is likely to be controversial.

Their scheme is to release some 20 tons of tungsten dust at an altitude of 1100km, creating a thin shell of particles that will entirely envelop the Earth. These tungsten particles will be just 30 micrometres across but still capable of packing a punch, tungsten being 1.7 times denser than lead.

Ganguli and co say that the dust's interaction with the atmosphere will cause its orbit to decay slowly. But within 10 years or so, it should drop below the critical 900 km level. After that, it will deorbit more quickly.

However, the crucial point is that the tungsten particles will naturally collide with any debris it encounters, taking this junk with it. The dust and the debris will then burn up in the Earth's atmosphere over the next 25 years or so.

So over period of 35 years, the orbits up to 1100km will be scrubbed clean. Ganguli and co call it a "dust snow plow".

There's an obvious question here: what of larger objects that get caught up in the dust storm, operational satellites, for example?

Ganguli and co say the risk is manageable. First, these satellites could be designed to move above the cloud. But even if they don't move, Gangulia and co claim these spacecraft will not be significantly damaged by the dust. "Dust grains of the size proposed by NRL will certainly not penetrate thermal blankets, spacecraft structure, or sensor baffles," they say.

They add that more sensitive equipment, such as the optics of Earth observing sensors or space telescopes, usually point straight up or straight down and so should be protected from dust flying in from the side.

One concern is solar panels which are likely to be sand blasted by the cloud. But Ganguli and co say that panels for the next generation of spacecraft could be strengthened to cope with this kind of problem.

There's also the question of the tungsten cloud's dynamics. Ganguli and co imagine it forming a shell about 30 km thick. This shell would then deorbit steadily. But there's another possible scenario: that the tungsten band simply widens to form a cloud several hundred kilometres thick!

The NRL will need to do more work on this problem.

Then there is one group of people whose concerns Ganguli and co fail to address entirely in this paper: astronomers. While a cloud of tungsten particles would have little affect at visible frequencies, astronomers will want to know what kind of effect this cloud will have at other wavelengths.

Is it possible that a cloud of metal particles encircling the Earth could significantly degrade our view of the Universe at certain frequencies, perhaps even acting like a giant spherical mirror? More work is needed here too.

But before dismissing the proposal out of hand, the alternative has to considered.

In 2007, the destruction of a defunct communications satellite at 900km by a Chinese anti-satellite weapon created, in an instant, 2400 pieces of large debris and countless smaller ones. The collision between the Iridium 33 and Kosmos 2251 satellite in 2009 created a similar amount of debris.

It's likely that we'll see more events of this kind in future and the possibility of a catastrophic cascade of collisions from the debris they produce.

So Ganguli and co are presenting the space-faring world with a choice: the controlled exposure of all satellites to a low level of small collisions or the uncontrolled exposure of a few satellites to catastrophic collisions.

Viewed in that way, NRL's orbiting dust storm may not be the perfect answer but it could well be the lesser of two evils.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1104.1401 : A Concept For Elimination Of Small Orbital Debris

You can now follow The Physics arXiv Blog on Twitter

More information on NASA's planet-hunting efforts is online at http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov

Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

Nearly a decade ago, NASA built an Earth-monitoring satellite that could have observed global warming in action. Then the agency stashed it in a warehouse in Maryland, where it remains to this day.

It all began so hopefully. Al Gore proposed the satellite in 1998, at the National Innovation Summit at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Gazing skyward from the podium, the vice president described a spacecraft that would travel a full million miles from Earth to a gravity-neutral spot known as the L1 Lagrangian point, where it would remain fixed in place, facing the sunlit half of our planet. It would stream back to NASA video of our spherical home, and the footage would be broadcast continuously over the Web.

Not only would the satellite provide "a clearer view of our world," Gore promised, but it would also offer "tremendous scientific value" by carrying into space two instruments built to study climate change: EPIC, a polychromatic imaging camera made to measure cloud reflectivity and atmospheric levels of aerosols, ozone and water vapor; and NISTAR, a radiometer. NISTAR was especially important: Out in deep space, it would do something that scientists are still unable to do today directly and continuously monitor the Earth's albedo, or the amount of solar energy that our planet reflects into space versus the amount it absorbs.

We know some things about the Earth's albedo. We know that solar radiation is both absorbed and reflected everywhere on Earth, by granite mountaintops in New Hampshire and desert dunes in Saudi Arabia. We know that cloud cover also reflects some of it. We also know that increased concentrations of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are currently causing the planet to retain more solar energy than it once did. But there is much we don't know, because we don't have a way to directly and constantly monitor albedo on a global scale-that is, to directly observe a key indicator of global warming.

To understand changes in the Earth's climate, scientists rely on multiple and frequent readings of precipitation, temperature, aerosol and ozone levels, and a variety of other measurements, many of which are taken by Earth-monitoring satellites run by agencies such as NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the European Space Agency. But these spacecraft are all relatively close-at least 50 times as close as the L1 point-so their utility is limited. No space agency has ever launched a satellite capable ofseeing the whole Earth as a single, solar-energy-processing orb.

That's exactly what Gore's satellite was meant to do. He named it Triana, after Rodrigo de Triana, the sailor in Christopher Columbus's crew who first spied the New World. In 1998, NASA enlisted a 62-year-old physicist named Francisco Valero to lead in the design of Triana.

The agency expedited the program, with the goal of moving from conception to launch in three years, instead of the standard five or six. Giulio Rosanova, the mechanical-systems lead engineer for Triana, remembers bringing pepperoni rolls into work on Fridays, to cajole his crew of 15 into coming in on weekends. "We were excited," Rosanova says.

In those days, optimism abounded in NASA's earth-sciences division. In a promotional video, the agency suggested that its planet-monitoring mission would extend beyond Triana-that a subsequent companion satellite would be dispatched to L2, 930,000 miles away from Earth in the opposite direction, where it could constantly monitor the dark half of our planet. Together the two satellites would continuously watch the entire globe.

But in 2001, just a few months after the inauguration of George W. Bush, Triana's launch plan was quietly put on hold. "We were preparing to transport it to the launch site when we heard," Rosanova says. Instead, they wheeled the $100-million satellite into storage.

The mission entered a state of bureaucratic limbo. Around 2003, NASA renamed Triana the Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, but the satellite remained on the ground. During the Bush administration, it became politically vulnerable, largely because of its association with Gore. Dick Armey, then a Republican congressman from Texas, said of the satellite, "This idea supposedly came from a dream. Well, I once dreamed I caught a 10-foot bass. But I didn't call up the Fish and Wildlife Service and ask them to spend $30 million to make sure it happened." Despite the protests of independent scientists (including Paul Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist and Nobel Laureate who wrote in a 2006 letter that "it would be a major waste of scientific effort and opportunity to discard such a meaningful mission"), NASA delayed the launch indefinitely.

Today, NASA officials aren't eager to talk about it. When I first wrote to the agency last summer, I received a reply that made me feel like I'd asked about an unwanted pregnancy. "Currently DSCOVR is a mission without an agency," NASA publicist Sarah DeWitt wrote. "NASA still has no direction from anyone to fly the mission, so we don't really have anything definitive to say about its future as of right now." She suggested I contact NOAA, the other agency with a hand in the mission. When I did, the publicist there advised me write to NASA.

So began my campaign. For the next eight weeks I would call, e-mail, and generally hassle various contacts at multiple agencies in a seemingly vain effort to see, with my own eyes, the only satellite that NASA has built but never launched.

Since 1999, NASA and NOAA have been calling for an integrated Earth-observing system-a network of satellites that, among other things, would consistently measure changes in the Earth's climate. But that campaign is "languishing," said a 2010 Government Accountability Office report, and there are "significant gaps in future satellite coverage."

Meanwhile, Earth-observing satellites are subject to constant abuse. Cosmic rays grind on the delicate spectrometers that measure the planet's radiation. Over time, the satellites stray from their orbit and sink nearer to Earth. The data they collect becomes inconsistent. In short, they have limited life expectancies, and some of NASA's 14 Earth-observing satellites have already outlived theirs.

All of which makes DSCOVR's decade of dormancy more puzzling. In addition to the continuous macrolevel monitoring of the Earth's albedo that the satellite would perform, it could also be a crucial component of a larger satellite array. Because DSCOVR would be farther away from Earth than any other satellite, it would be able to see every other satellite in the sky. As a result, other satellites would be able to calibrate their location and sensors against DSCOVR. Moreover, because it would constantly face the moon, which has no atmosphere and thus a constant albedo, it would have a uniquely consistent baseline from which it could calibrate its instruments-and from which other satellites could calibrate as well. In this way, DSCOVR could be the keystone on which present and future space-based Earth-monitoring systems could depend.

Such a network would fulfill the primary missions of both agencies. NOAA's mission is first and foremost to "understand and predict changes in the Earth's environment." The National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, meanwhile, established NASA's first objective as the "expansion of human knowledge of the Earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space." Yet for nearly a decade now, space exploration has been a higher priority for NASA than monitoring our own planet. Just this spring, it succeeded in pulling off a familiar-sounding mission: STEREO, in which a pair of satellites orbit the sun and beam back continuous footage of our resident star. But DSCOVR remained in storage.

Last fall, my numerous entreaties to NASA were finally answered, and I was finally able to arrange a visit to Goddard Space Flight Center to see DSCOVR. Before I could get a glimpse, however, I was taken on a comprehensive tour that I couldn't help but suspect was designed to direct my attention toward a more positive narrative. First I met with Arthur Hou, the chief scientist for Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM), a multi-satellite mission that will start in 2013. Next my guide introduced me to the GPM's project managers. We all admired the shimmering metallic blankets that protect the spacecraft out in the cold, dark sky. Then the publicist gave me a GPM-branded coffee mug, souvenir ruler and license-plate frame. The detours continued. On the second morning of my two day visit, I was guided into a theater and given special sunglasses, so I could behold Goddard's first-ever 3-D film. Eventually, though, I got my wish: a look at DSCOVR. Or rather, the box that contains DSCOVR.

Standing in a small, carpeted nook, I was able to look through a small observation window into a high-ceilinged, white-walled clean room where a white metal crate was shoved into a corner, beneath a stairwell. DSCOVR sat inside. A green tube supplied the box with a steady feed of nitrogen, to minimize contaminants. It looked to me like forgotten hardware-last year's cellphone gathering dust in a desk drawer.

It has never become entirely clear why the satellite had ended up here. In his 2009 book Our Choice, Gore wrote, "The Bush Cheney administration canceled the launch within days of taking office on January 20, 2001, and forced NASA to put the satellite into storage." Warren Wiscombe, a senior physical scientist at NASA, blames a Bush-era "hostility" to earth science at NASA. "As to who ordered the axing of the mission," he says, "we'll never know, but the word we got was that Dick Cheney was behind it."

Mitchell Anderson, a Vancouver-based reporter who has obsessively covered the DSCOVR story, also suspects Cheney's hand, citing an unnamed NASA informant. Over the course of three years, Anderson filed five Freedom of Information Act requests for documents related to DSCOVR. After querying NASA in 2006, he waited 11 months to receive the documents. "They told me they were consulting with their lawyers," says Anderson, who was then writing for desmogblog.com. "When they finally e-mailed me the documents, they were scanned sideways. I couldn't read the top and bottom of the pages." The 70-page packet contained mostly letters that prominent scientists had written in defense of DSCOVR. All correspondence relating to the mission's mothballing was excluded.

In May 2007, six years after DSCOVR's original launch date was canceled, NASA convened 35 satellite specialists for a one-day workshop to decide to what extent DSCOVR would be able to replace the existing system of aging American satellites once they are decommissioned. The scientists agreed that the satellite has unique observational capabilities-the report the committee produced notes, "Sensors on the DSCOVR satellite have the potential to make important and innovative measurements from a novel perspective"-but they decided that it was not itself a suitable long-term replacement for an entire network.

Hal Maring, the atmospheric chemist who chaired the workshop, says that other satellite projects in the pipeline could do some of DSCOVR's work. NASA has a new low-Earth-orbiting mission, CLARREO, to be launched sometime in the next decade, and Maring says, "The [satellite] calibration capability offered by CLARREO will be much more useful than that possible with DSCOVR."

Wiscombe doesn't buy it. He says DSCOVR was stigmatized: "People called it GoreSAT, and NASA found people who would be the most hostile toward DSCOVR for the workshop. They handpicked the assassins."

Yet DSCOVR isn't dead. For all the talk of the satellite's cancellation, the 2009 federal omnibus budget bill, the first passed under the Obama administration, contained $9 million specifically allocated "to refurbish and ensure flight and operational readiness of DSCOVR earth science instruments."

At Goddard, I met with Joe Burt, the lean and ebullient project leader for DSCOVR. Burt told me that in late 2009, a team of 15 technicians and engineers uncrated DSCOVR and found it in "outstanding" condition. "The propulsion tank hasn't lost a fraction of pressure after being put away for years," he says. "Everything mechanical on the satellite is working well. It's ready to go." He added that the two earth-science instruments built for DSCOVR-EPIC and NISTAR-have recently undergone a $2-million refurbishment. "They're in fine shape," he says. "They're changing a couple of wavelengths on the filter. With different filters, you can see different things-different aerosols, different clouds. But it's not a big deal. Changing the filters is kind of like putting on a different pair of sunglasses." Burt says now that NASA has done the refurbishing, it could fly the satellite to L1, as soon as 2014-if NOAA and the Air Force, which is interested in the effects of solar weather on its technology, provide the approximately $125 million to pay for the launch.

This all seemed like promising news until I visited NOAA, where I realized that interagency dysfunction still threatens DSCOVR's fate. At NOAA's headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, an assistant administrator named Mary Kicza told me that the climate instruments, EPIC and NISTAR, would be aboard the satellite when and if it launches. Then, speaking slowly, she said: "but earth science is not NOAA's purpose for the mission."

Instead, NOAA, like the Air Force, is interested in how the sun damages electronic equipment on Earth. It wants to equip DSCOVR with a coronagraph, an instrument that would monitor the plasma, particles and magnetic fields that stream out of the sun. Surges of plasma and magnetism can disrupt power supplies, short-circuit satellite electronics, and scuttle aircraft-navigation systems. "The goal," Kicza said, "is to send warnings back to Earth."

What about EPIC and NISTAR? I asked. "Those instruments are part of NASA's program," Kicza said, "and you don't just flick them on. You need a ground system in place. You need algorithms developed." Are the algorithms developed? "For that," she said, "you'd really need to talk to NASA."

Sitting there, I feared that simple bureaucracy might yield a weird paradox-a Deep Space Climate Observatory mission that would do no climate observing.

Francisco Valero, the physicist who led DSCOVR's design team, is familiar with bureaucratic black holes. He is now 75 years old and retired, but he still actively tracks the fate of his creation. I figured that if anyone could accurately assess DSCOVR's chances of one day completing its mission, it would be him.

A few weeks after my visit to NASA and NOAA, I met Valero at his hilltop home in La Jolla, California. He has blood clots in his legs and related respiratory problems that sometimes leave him gasping for breath, but he was eager to talk. Sitting in his sparely appointed study, he explained how decades of research led him to imagine DSCOVR.

Valero fled his native Argentina in 1968 after a military coup. Amid widespread student protests, soldiers showed up at his university lab with machine guns to bar him from entry. He came to the U.S. so that he could do science at a remove from political uproar. Instead, he wound up in another kind of maelstrom. Since DSCOVR was shelved, Valero has persistently and publicly raised questions about the direction of NASA's earth-science program, and he has questioned where funds earmarked for DSCOVR have gone. In 2004, when Ukraine offered to send DSCOVR to L1 on a Ukrainian rocket-for free-Valero lobbied NASA to accept. "The satellite was built, the launch was free, and what did NASA say? The launch wouldn't be safe for the satellite." He shook his head in disdain. "I tell you, I lose sleep thinking about this stuff." Much of Valero's career focused on the effects that human activity can have on the Earth's albedo, and when the opportunity to lead DSCOVR arose, he immediately recognized its potential. "With low-Earth-orbiting satellites, you can't get that," he said. "It's like you're reading a book with only one letter on each page. You can't get the whole story."

For Valero, DSCOVR isn't merely a satellite-it's part of the solution to one of the most pressing issues of our time. "We just need the truth," he said. "We need good science. If we get DSCOVR launched, we'll have that. And then the politicians will have something solid to base their arguments on."

Such persistent criticism, combined with long-festering resentments from scientists whose funding was redirected to pay for DSCOVR, has only earned Valero enemies at the agency. "He is hated at NASA headquarters," Wiscombe says. "His name is anathema there."

But a week after my visit, it was widely reported that Obama's proposed 2011 budget would increase NASA's earth-science budget by $2.4 billion over the next five years. The funding would enable the agency to launch three Earth-observing satellites in 2011, including Glory, a delayed low-Earth-orbiting spacecraft that will monitor albedo, albeit not from the same privileged perch as DSCOVR would.

I called Valero to see what he thought of the news. He was guarded. "Is NASA's budget increase good news for DSCOVR?" he said. "I doubt it. Not in the present environment at NASA. They resist new approaches, and after spending decades and billions on traditional low-Earth-orbit satellites, they're too heavily invested to expand to new perspectives like L1." He was silent a moment. Then his mood brightened.

"This satellite will fly someday," he said. "I have hope, for I think there's a beauty to science. It keeps asking questions. It demands answers, and it moves forward. DSCOVR represents the future. It has to launch, and it will."

There are so many amazing things going on this April! And I do mean all month long... when it rains, it pours!

Astronomers Without Borders has declared "Global Astronomy Month" in April 2011, and is hosting a worldwide celebration of star-gazing in their global effort to "reconnect humanity to the sky", having been inspired by all the events and enthusiasm of the International Year of Astronomy (2009).


Their cornerstone project is 100 Hours of Astronomy, where teachers & schools, astronomy clubs, science museums, observatories, and planetariums all participate in public outreach and group observing activities (many of which will also be available for participation online in various areas).

The month just kicked off with the Lord of the Rings (Saturn watch, of course) this past weekend, and the next major events throughout April will all be dedicated to solidarity of cultures through sharing the sky, fighting light pollution, and the overall cultural history of how humanity has recorded events in the heavens.

April 9th will see the Global Star Party sweep around Earth. April 10-16th is Lunar Week. On April 17th, the astronomy teams take a break from the darkness and celebrate SunDay to appreciate our nearest stellar friend. The final mass event will be April 21st-22nd with the Lyrids meteor shower watch, those caused by the debris in the trail of Comet Thatcher.


Lastly, though certainly not leastly (I know it's not a word, don't email me en masse!!), April is an exciting month historically for many space firsts, and we have some huge anniversaries this year!

April 1, 1960 – TIROS-1, the first Imaging weather satellite was launched by NASA.

April 3, 1966 – The Soviets' LUNA 10 craft was the very first to orbit the Moon.

April 12, 1961 – On Vostok 1, Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space.

April 23, 1971 – Salyut 1 became the first human-crewed space station to launch


Pretty amazing stuff! More to come on Yuri, of course, as the month progresses. Who's going to Yuri's Night parties in their area??

MIT researchers increase their odds of detecting an Earthlike planet by working on a combination of satellite missions.

Kepler space telescope’s major drawback is that because the telescope is only focused on a narrow field of the sky, it is observing faraway, faint stars and may be missing closer stars — the kind that will enable the best follow-up observations from the ground.

A team of MIT researchers led by Kavli Senior Research Scientist George Ricker is currently designing a satellite that would use six wide-angled, high-precision cameras to observe a wider region of the sky — one 400 times larger than revealed by Kepler's scope. By surveying some 2.5 million stars, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) could potentially detect between 1,600 and 2,700 planets within two years, including between 100 and 300 small planets, several of which could be Earth candidates.



TESS has been in development since 2007, when NASA selected Ricker’s team to develop a mission as part of its Small Explorer satellite program to provide funding for missions using small- to midsized spacecraft. Although NASA elected not to proceed with TESS in 2009, the agency is accepting new proposals later this year and has increased the budget from $105 million to $200 million.

This fall, the TESS team has been finalizing a new proposal that reflects the budget increase. “The higher cost cap means we can use bigger cameras and bigger lenses to get more data,” says Seager, who is the deputy mission scientist for TESS. The group is also refining its estimates of the number and type of exoplanets that TESS could find.

Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite at wikipedia

The survey would focus the G and K spectral type stars brighter than 12 magnitudes, approximately 2 million of them would be studied, and the 1,000 closest M-type red dwarfs (within 30 parsecs). It is expected to discover 1,000 - 10,000 transiting exoplanets down to the size of the Earth and up to 2 months of period. The candidates could be later investigated by the HARPS spectrometer and some of them could be targets of the James Webb Space Telescope. The developer team is optimistic enough to claim that the first interstellar space missions' destinations could be among these stars.

Utilizing CubeSats

Another satellite effort currently underway at MIT is ExoplanetSat, a research project inspired by the increasing use of cube satellites, or “CubeSats,” by research universities as a way to conduct observations in space. The Rubik’s Cube-sized satellites are popular because they can piggyback on a variety of launch vehicles for a fraction of what it costs to put larger satellites in space. There are about a dozen CubeSats currently orbiting Earth.

Seager’s idea is that the odds of detecting a transiting planet orbiting a bright star increase significantly if there is just one telescope dedicated to observing a star that neither Kepler nor TESS can observe.

The concept eventually developed into ExoplanetSat, a research program that is designed to launch a fleet of about one dozen “triple CubeSats” (three cubes stuck together), and about another two dozen six-unit CubeSats into low-Earth orbit. Each satellite would have its own computer, processor and tiny camera and would be pointed at an individual star. Although the program doesn’t have funding yet, MIT students will try to build two prototypes within the next two years and then hopefully secure funding for a formal mission to send dozens of the tiny cubes into space.

But detecting Earthlike planets may only be half the battle, according to Joshua Winn, an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Physics, who says “it remains to be seen” if current telescope technology will enable researchers to study Earthlike planets with enough detail to confirm whether they can host life. For now, researchers await the 2014 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, an instrument whose size will make it easier to obtain higher-quality data of exoplanet atmospheres.

ExoplanetSat: detecting transiting exoplanets using a low-cost CubeSat platform

Nanosatellites, i.e. spacecraft that weigh between 1 and 10 kg, are drawing increasing interest as platforms for conducting on-orbit science. This trend is primarily driven by the ability to piggyback nanosatellites on the launch of large spacecraft and hence achieve orbit at greatly reduced cost. The CubeSat platform is a standardized nanosatellite configuration, consisting of one, two, or three 10 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm units (1, 2, or 3 "U"s) arranged in a row. We present a CubeSat-based concept for the discovery of transiting exoplanets around the nearest and brightest Sun-like stars. The spacecraft prototype - termed ExoplanetSat - is a 3U space telescope capable of monitoring a single target star from low Earth orbit. Given the volume limitations of the CubeSat form factor, designing a capable spacecraft requires overcoming significant challenges. This work presents the initial satellite configuration along with several subsystem-specific solutions to the aforementioned constraints. An optical design based on a modified commercial off-the-shelf camera lens is given. We also describe a novel two-stage attitude control architecture that combines 3-axis reaction wheels for coarse pointing with a piezoelectric translation stage at the focal plane for fine pointing. Modeling and simulation results are used to demonstrate feasibility by quantifying ExoplanetSat pointing precision, signal-to-noise ratio, guide star magnitude, and additional design parameters which determine system performance.

Achieving high-precision pointing on ExoplanetSat: initial feasibility analysis

ExoplanetSat is a proposed three-unit CubeSat designed to detect down to Earth-sized exoplanets in an orbit out to the habitable zone of Sun-like stars via the transit method. To achieve the required photometric precision to make these measurements, the target star must remain within the same fraction of a pixel, which is equivalent to controlling the pointing of the satellite to the arcsecond level. The satellite will use a two-stage control system: coarse control will be performed by a set of reaction wheels, desaturated by magnetic torque coils, and fine control will be performed by a piezoelectric translation stage. Since no satellite of this size has previously demonstrated this high level of pointing precision, a simulation has been developed to prove the feasibility of realizing such a system. The current baseline simulation has demonstrated the ability to hold the target star to within 0.05 pixels or 1.8 arcseconds (with an 85 mm lens and 15 μm pixels), in the presence of large reaction wheel disturbances as well as external environmental disturbances. This meets the current requirement of holding the target star to 0.14 pixels or 5.0 arcseconds. Other high-risk aspects of the design have been analyzed such as the effect of changing the guide star centroiding error, changing the CMOS sampling frequency, and reaction wheel selection on the slew performance of the satellite. While these results are promising as an initial feasibility analysis, further model improvements and hardware-in-the-loop tests are currently underway.

If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon. Thanks

Featured articles

Ocean Floor Gold and Copper
   Ocean Floor Mining Company

More information


Research paper in A&A
GROND website
Photos of the La Silla Observatory
Photo of MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope

Contacts

Jochen Greiner
Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics
Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49 89 30000 3847
Email: jcg@mpe.mpg.de

Richard Hook
ESO, La Silla, Paranal, E-ELT and Survey Telescopes Public Information Officer
Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49 89 3200 6655
Cell: +49 151 1537 3591
Email: rhook@eso.org

Priscilla Vega/Jia-Rui Cook 818-354-1357/354-0850
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
priscilla.r.vega@jpl.nasa.gov / Jia-Rui.C.Cook@jpl.nasa.gov

• Watch the Collaboration demo
• Find a Cognos 10 event near you
• Read more on IBM.com

• Watch the Collaboration demo
• Find a Cognos 10 event near you
• Read more on IBM.com

The hunt for 'exoplanets' – worlds outside our solar system – has had several successes, and new space telescopes will boost the chances of finding more

Gliese 581 is a modest star lying in an unfashionable part of the constellation Libra. It is dim, small and even though relatively close to Earth, cannot be seen by the naked eye. It is, to put it simply, insignificant – the Crouch End of interstellar real estate. But astronomers have recently found that it possesses an intriguing secret. In 2009, observations showed that the star has a family of five planets, including at least one body roughly the same size as Earth.

In September this year, this news was topped by US scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who announced they had detected a sixth planet orbiting the star. Crucially, this one seems to be orbiting in a region known as the "Goldilocks zone" – that part of space surrounding a star where it is not too hot and not too cold to support life, but just right.

The existence of Gliese 581g, as it is prosaically known, has been doubted by a group of Swiss astronomers, who can find no trace of the planet in their own analysis of the same data. But this controversy has, at least, raised the profile of those searching the universe for worlds like our own, a science whose sophistication has risen dramatically in the past few years.

The first extrasolar planet – or "exoplanet" – was discovered in orbit around the star PSR 1257+12 in 1992. Since then, developing techniques have revealed the presence of almost 500 more. Our galaxy appears to enjoy a rich abundance of worlds on which life might be detected. According to Giovanna Tinetti, an exoplanet expert at University College London: "These discoveries suggest planets are quite common in our galaxy – they make me optimistic that life is also common."

To date, most exoplanets detected have been giant worlds similar to Jupiter, the largest planet in our own solar system. A large proportion also orbit close to their mother stars; the crushing gravity fields and searing heat of these worlds make them unlikely candidates as homes for aliens.

However, more recently, astronomers have been able to pinpoint smaller, more Earth-like planets in more promising, temperate orbits.

Given the average star's colossal output of radiation and light, the ability to spot a tiny object that is less than one-10,000th as bright is quite an achievement. To do this, two key techniques are used, says Tinetti. The first involves studying the way planets make a star wobble as it moves across the sky. "A planet will pull it one way and then another as it orbits round a star," she says. "This fluctuation in its movements can then be revealed by studying the resulting shifts in its spectrum that are produced by the Doppler effect." This is the technique that was used to reveal the planets that orbit Gliese 581.

The second involves observing stars and noting any regular dimming that is caused by a planet sweeping in front of it. This system offers scientists better opportunities to study exoplanets directly and to observe the composition of their atmosphere. However, only 2% of planetary systems can be studied this way: those whose orbits are aligned so that they cross the face of their mother star when viewed from Earth. "These are the most promising planets for investigation because we can actually detect the presence of elements and chemicals in their atmospheres," says Tinetti. "We have found the presence of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane, water vapour and other gases in some exoplanets, although these have all been super-giants with temperatures far too high to support life. On the other hand, it does show that the presence of the building blocks of organic matter – such as methane – is fairly widespread."

Even if Gliese 581g turns out not to exist, scientists using transit observations have pinpointed what looks to be an exoplanet of especial interest. Last December, a team at the Harvard–Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics announced the discovery of a planet round Gliese 1214, a small, dim red star in the constellation Ophiuchus. (These stars are named after the German astronomer Wilhelm Gliese who published, in 1957, a catalogue of near-Earth stars.) This world – known as Gliese 1214b – appears to be composed largely of water and has a mass and diameter two or three times that of Earth. "This is now the subject of a great deal of astronomical attention from observatories around the world," says Tinetti. "In a few months, these studies should be ready for publication and could provide some real surprises."

Further boosts to the detection of exoplanets will also occur in the next few years with the launch of new space telescopes. In addition to the huge land-based observatories now sweeping the skies for distant worlds, and existing telescopes such as the Hubble, Spitzer, Corot, and Kepler probes, new missions will include Europe's Gaia probe, which is scheduled for launch in 2012 and which is designed to detect, among other things, more than 100,000 exoplanets. European astronomers are also pressing for the construction of something they are calling the Exoplanet Characterisation Observatory (Echo) – an orbiting satellite that could study these worlds in detail and pinpoint those that are most likely to support life.

The Republic of Brazil will defend the free distribution of satellite images and data during the Summit of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO, for its acronym in English) to be held next week in Beijing ( China), official sources said.

The Brazilian position at the meeting, to be held from 3 to 5 November, was announced Wednesday by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), which is represented in China by its director, Gilberto Camara.

The INPE, pioneer in the distribution of satellite images, will defend in Beijing said the implementation of a comprehensive policy of free access to satellite data.

The GEO is an intergovernmental organization of 84 countries that are part and 56 international organizations like the European Commission.

"Brazil supports the free distribution of satellite data, known as the Data Democracy and Capaccitty Building program, which is being implemented by INPE" according to a note of this State to the Ministry of Science and Technology Agency reported Xinhua.

The Capaccity Building is an initiative that also seeks to provide satellite data free of charge, to build a common infrastructure with capacity to receive this information, interpret and transmit easily to the end user.

GEO Summit in China, at the ministerial level, will assess the implementation plan adopted in 2005, when the group was created, and to define the goals of the triennium 2011-2013.

The main objectives of the GEO is to improve the access of data from Earth observation and discuss their applications, and coordinate efforts to implement the Global Observing System of Systems (GEOSS).

Inpe began offering free beginning in June 2004, the satellite images Satellite Program Chinese Brazilian Remote Surveillance (CBERS) and soon after did the same with the U.S. Landsat satellite images to which he was entitled.

In the middle of last year, five years after it was implemented this policy, Brazil reached the one million mark satellite images distributed to businesses, organizations and countries that used for studies and environmental applications, agriculture and weather.

According to INPE, the success of this pioneering initiative led other countries, including the U.S., also provide the orbiting satellite images of medium resolution.

The countries benefiting from Brazilian politics are those of South America, who have access to images of their territories received by INPE's station in the city of Cuiabá.

The Institute also signed agreements to offer African countries Cbers images that reach the ground receiving stations of Hartebeeshoek (South Africa), Aswan (Egypt) and Maspaloms (Canary Island).

That's okay, climate change doesn't care. It just keeps happening, moving on at an ever increasing rate. It isn't running for office so it doesn't mind if you ignore it or if you need to pretend to it isn't real to get campaign contributions or excite your base of Fox News watching zombies to vote for you in the primary. And it isn't going anywhere either, no matter how much you call it a hoax to steal our precious freedoms. This year, already the hottest 8 months on record has been another year where the ice at the North pole has melted so much that the Northwest passage (basically above Canada) and the Northern Sea Route (basically the sea above Siberia and Scandinavia) are both navigable. In fact ... The Northwest Passage and the Northern Sea Route are largely free of ice, allowing the potential for a circumnavigation of the Arctic Ocean. At least two expeditions are attempting this feat, the Norwegian explorer Borge Ousland and the Peter I yacht from Russia. Just one more of those weird weather anomalies this year (record flooding in US and Pakistan), heat waves and wild fired in Russia, drought in Australia, etc. etc. etc. that don't really prove any thing right? Uh, not exactly: Arctic sea ice generally reaches its annual minimum extent in mid-September. This August, ice extent was the second lowest in the satellite record, after 2007. On September 3, ice extent dropped below the seasonal minimum for 2009 to become the third lowest in the satellite record. [...] Ice extent for August 2010 was the second lowest in the satellite record for the month. In fact, August sea ice measures have been declining since 1979 at a pretty consistent 8.9% per decade: But that's not all! Much of the ice that is at "The Top of the World" is rotten! No seriously, it is rotten. Last year, Dave Barber, a researcher from the University of Manitoba, reported unusual conditions in the Beaufort Sea with large regions of rotten ice. Satellite imagery from the NASA Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer - Earth Observing System (AMSR-E) sensors suggest similar conditions this year in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, where there are large areas with unconsolidated ice floes and low ice concentration. So what do scientists mean when the talk about "rotten" ice? About what you would expect, actually: [F]loating ice which has become honeycombed in the course of melting, and which is in an advanced state of disintegration. Which is maybe why these guys girls are hanging out at the crowded arctic beaches (for the third year out of the past four) rather than out on the ice like they used to do: For the third time in four years, a dearth of sea ice has forced walruses ashore in Alaska. The lumbering marine mammals normally spend their summers resting on the ice as it floats north, making periodic dives to the ocean floor to forage for food. But this year, as in 2007 and 2009, a lack of ice in the eastern Chukchi Sea has driven thousands of walruses to congregate on land instead. Officials with the U.S. Geological Survey and the Fish and Wildlife Service estimate that at least 10,000 animals have gathered in a dense clump at Point Lay, Alaska. [...] The risk of injury and death is greatest for the youngest animals, which are dwarfed by adult female walruses that weigh about 1 ton each. Last year, when walruses sought shelter on the shore of Icy Cape, Alaska, many of the 131 animals that were trampled to death there were juveniles, USGS found. Similarly deadly stampedes have also been reported in Russia in recent years (ClimateWire, Aug. 10). I don't care what you say, 10,000 walruses on a beach is too many. And doesn't anyone care about the children? Imagine a holiday on a beach packed with people as tightly as sardines (oh, 10,000 mildly obese Americans perhaps with their offspring) and suddenly someone sees a shark and people started running around in a panic, trampling everyone underneath them, including small toddlers. That's what climate change thinks is a good joke to play on walruses. So Republicans, deny climate change all you want. Threaten (along with coal state Dems like Jay Rockefeller) to cut the EPA off at the knees with new legislation sharply limiting iots right to regulate greenhouse climate legislation (backed by -- surprise, surprise, surprise! -- The American Petroleum Institute): Senate Republicans may use a markup of EPA’s annual spending bill Thursday to try and block the agency from implementing new climate change rules. An amendment to thwart EPA could gain traction on the Senate Appropriations Committee, which includes five Democrats who have previously backed proposals to delay or scuttle limits on greenhouse gases from power plants and other sources. [...] A spokesman for Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), a member of the panel who opposes EPA rules, said no decisions have been made yet about a potential amendment. But sources contacted by The Hill said Murkowski has draft language in progress that would not allow EPA to spend any funds for one year on regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and other stationary sources. Climate Change doesn't mind what you believe or what you do. It doesn't care if you are a not conservative enough Republican Senator Lisa Murkoski or a foaming at the mouth Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle who wants to disband the Department of Energy and withdraw from the UN because it's "the umpire on fraudulent science such as global warming." "I'm a clean-air proponent," Angle said in an interview. "I don't, however, buy into the whole ... man-caused global warming, man-caused climate change mantra of the left. I believe that there's not sound science to back that up." Climate Change just sits back and laughs at the folly of poor pitiful human beings, too greedy and stupid to even attempt to stop it. Enjoy your rotten ice everyone!

PHOTO CAPTION: An extreme ultraviolet image from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory shows Monday's solar activity on the sun. Watch a video explaining the filament and the flare that were ejected from the sun on Sunday.

Alan Boyle writes: The first wave of stormy weather from the sun hit Earth today, setting the stage for slightly brighter northern lights tonight - but a bigger light show is expected on Thursday, when the second wave is due to hit.

Both waves were set off on Sunday, when a solar flare and a whooshing magnetic filament erupted on the sun, as seen in a series of images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. Forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center, based in Colorado, say those two events sent two distinct waves of electrically charged particles toward Earth.

The first wave, sparked by the flare, began sweeping over our planet's magnetosphere at about 1 p.m. ET today and peaked at 3:30 p.m., based on real-time satellite readings of the proton flux. The arrival was heralded by elevated readings from the Advanced Composition Explorer satellite, or ACE. "We can see it hitting the ACE satellite even as we speak," Doug Biesecker, a spokesman for the Space Weather Prediction Center, told me today.

Biesecker said the relatively low-level magnetic disturbance may have caused some power-grid fluctuations and some weirdness for high-accuracy navigation systems, but he didn't expect the event to have any impact for "the average person on the street."

So how about tonight's auroral displays?

"It bodes well for folks in Canada, at least," he told me. "The strength of this storm is such that it's unlikely that people in the U.S. will have much of a chance. Except Alaska. They always have a chance."

Observers in northern Europe and Asia could conceivably have an advantage because their peak observing hours (midnight to dawn) are closer to the peak hours for geomagnetic activity. And Biesecker acknowledged that auroral displays could be more widespread than he and his colleagues expect.

Even if the northern lights can't be seen from your locale, it's still worth checking out the night sky, particularly if you can get away from city lights. After sunset, you can check out the planetary triangle that's forming in western skies. After midnight, you might spot some shooting stars, part of the buildup for this month's Perseid meteor shower. Before sunrise, you could catch the International Space Station as it flies overhead.

The forecast for northern lights is better for Thursday, when space weather forecasters expect another wave of particles from the filament ejection to hit Earth's magnetic field. The second wave is projected to have more of an effect than the first one. "It's a case of priming the pump with the first one," Biesecker explained. "The second one can do a little bit more than it could on its own."

There's a good chance of seeing an aurora from Michigan's Upper Peninsula and the northern parts of Minnesota and North Dakota. In fact, folks across the northern tier of the United States, from Maine and upstate New York to Washington state, could be well-placed to see rippling waves of reddish or greenish light in the sky.

Aurora-seeking skywatchers in the Carolinas or Georgia are likely to be disappointed, but you never know. Space weather forecasters, like your typical TV meteorologists, don't always nail their predictions 100 percent. Keep an eye on the three-hour Kp index (5 or higher is good for seeing the northern lights, but not so good for satellites).

Update for 5:09 p.m. ET Aug. 3: Here's another take on the aurora-viewing outlook from Christine Pulliam at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

"We'll have multiple opportunities for a display of the Northern Lights over the next two days. The latest word from the solar scientists is that the sun erupted not just once, but four times. All four coronal mass ejections are headed toward Earth.

"Space weather forecasts are even more challenging than regular weather forecasts. Dr. Leon Golub says a coronal mass ejection is like a hurricane: It's large and fuzzy, and doesn't always move at the same speed. Currently, the estimated arrival times are:

Wednesday, Aug. 4 - 3 a.m. EDT
Wednesday, Aug. 4 - 1 p.m. EDT (aurorae not visible in daylight)
Wednesday, Aug. 4 - 8 p.m. EDT
Thursday, Aug. 5 - 2 a.m. EDT

"Any one of these events may or may not generate an aurora. It depends on details like magnetic field orientation. If the magnetic field in the oncoming solar plasma is directed opposite Earth's magnetic field, the result could be spectacular aurorae. If the fields line up, the coronal mass ejection could slide past our planet with nary a ripple.

"Viewing tips: No fancy equipment is needed to see the Northern Lights. You should seek a viewing location with dark skies, as far from city lights as possible. Then, look to the north. An aurora appears as a ghostly sheen of light, colored green or red, that slowly shimmers and undulates over time. An aurora can disappear within minutes or last for hours."

Update for 8:30 p.m. ET Aug. 3: One of the puzzles surrounding the sun has to do with the extended period of low activity during the most recent 11-year solar cycle. Why was the sun quiet for so long? An analysis just now being published in Geophysical Research Letters suggests an answer: The sun's conveyor belt took an unusually meandering course, stretching out the solar cycle. The solar conveyor belt transports super-hot plasma around the sun, much as Earth's ocean conveyor belt transports water and heat around our planet. Usually the flow gets no closer to the poles than 60 degrees latitude, but during solar cycle 23, the flow went all the way to the poles. Computer simulations showed that a stretched-out conveyor belt could stretch out the cycle's duration.

• added by: EthicalVegan  
• 2 comments

By Dr. Franck Marchis
Planetary Astronomer at the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute

I mentioned in my previous post that we observed several known multiple asteroid systems during our last observing run with the W.M. Keck Observatory and its Adaptive Optics Systems. If you have been following my personal blogs and/or the scientific articles of our group (you are courageous...) you know this is the scientific topic which is taking most of my time recently. Today, as you can see if you explore our VOBAD database, we know 192 companions of asteroids. What I meant by "we know" is that one group announced to have discovered one or several satellites using techniques such as:

• lightcurve measurements (44% of them) for which we detect mutual events (eclipse/occulation between components) or multi-frequency variations (due to the asynchronous spin of the components)
• radar observations (12%). We detect the echo of a radar-wave which bounces on the components of the system when it is close to Earth (mostly limited to NEAs)
• high angular resolution direct imaging using the Hubble Space Telescope (28%) or adaptive optics on 8-10m class telescopes (16%)

My group is essentially using Adaptive Optics (AO) technique to search for new multiple asteroid systems. We also monitor them to derive the orbital elements, the mass of the system, the size and shapes of the components, an estimate of their ages, surface composition and so on. The goal of this study is to uncover clues concerning the formation and evolution of these mini-planetary systems.

During our last run, we observed several known multiple asteroid systems. My colleague, Pascal Descamps from the IMCCE, used our processed data to compare these observations with the shape predicted with our orbital models.

Let's start with (90) Antiope, a doublet binary system (Type-2 based in our VOBAD nomenclature), made of two ellipsoidal components with an average diameter of 91 km and 86 km, orbiting at ~171 km around their center of mass in 16.5 h. Its bulk density is quite low, estimated to 1.3 g/cc, implying an rubble pile interior or an internal composition saturated with water ice.

As you can see the observed position of the two components (left) is in excellent agreement with our orbital model (right). The model shows a large 68-km bowl-shaped crater on one of the components that was introduced to better fit the lightcurves observed in 2007. Unfortunately, we can't resolve it using the W.M. Keck II telescope so we will need an image from a 30m-class telescope or a space mission to be able to confirm its genuineness. We think that this system is one of the most primitive binary asteroid which is the result of the catastrophic disruption of a large 450 km asteroid which happened 2.5 Byrs. It is still unclear how it became a doublet asteroid, it may have split due to fission after an oblique impact on one of the components (hence the large crater), but simulations are needed to confirm this scenario.

(22) Kalliope is a Type-1 binary system, composed of a large 166-km irregularly shaped primary and a 28-km satellite (named Linus) that we studied intensively in 2007. From this study we derived a new shape model and derived a large bulk density of 3.35 g/cc. The picture below shows a comparison between the resolved image of the primary and the new shape model. As you can see the agreement is striking.

We also detected the satellite, as shown on the image on the left. We are happy to report that its measured position is very close (6.5 milli-arcsec to be precised) to the position predited by our new dynamical model (developed by F. Vachier and J. Berthier). More news on this...

(45) Eugenia is the last interesting system that we observed with Keck AO. This is a Type-1 triple asteroid system, made of a large 217 km ellipsoidal primary and TWO 5 & 7 km satellites orbiting at ~600 and ~1200 km. We discovered the second satellite in 2007 after reprocessing carefully several VLT/NACO data recorded in 2004 (see below the left image. The arrows indicate the positions of the moons). With this improved version of the Keck AO system, and because of the large aperture of the telescope, the second and closer moonlet is easily detected as shown in the figure below (see the green circles on the right image).

It is motivating to see how the improvement in imaging quality of an AO systems allow us to see smaller and closer satellites around asteroids. The same technique is used to search for faint exoplanets around nearby stars like the recently discovered Beta Pic B.

That's all for multiple asteroids... I will next write about our new instrument about to be tested at Lick Shane-3m telescope.

Clear skies...

July 20, 2010

Read the comments on this post...

Early results from NASA's Kepler Mission, a small satellite observing deep space, has suggested planets like Earth are far more widespread than previously thought.

MELBOURNE - Scientists involved in NASA’s Kepler Mission have reportedly discovered more than 700 new planets - including up to 140 similar in size to Earth - in just six weeks of using the powerful new space observatory. Early results from NASA’s Kepler Mission, a small satellite observing deep space, has suggested planets like Earth [..] Read the original article: here.

This animated video shares a series of fascinating facts about how climate change affects oceans, land, the atmosphere, and ice sheets around the world. With the help of an animated astronaut touring the Earth, the video explains how NASA's Earth observing satellite fleet enables scientists to gather accurate data and understand those changes. Produced by NASA Earth Science experts, the animation will play in movie theater lobbies all over America. To learn more about this video, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/KnowYourEarth.html To download this video, visit: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?10605 Like our videos? Subscribe to NASA's Goddard Shorts HD podcast: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/iTunes/f0004_index.html Or get tweeted by NASA: http://twitter.com/NASAGoddard Or find us on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/nasa.gsfc

Can you please answer these questions about astronomy? 10POINTS!!? In Ptolemy's geocentric model, retrograde motion occurs when the planet is closest to us, on the inside portion of the equant. ecliptic. ellipse. deferent. epicycle. In Ptolemy's geocentric model, the normal eastward motion of the planets was along a retrograde loop. a deferent. an epicycle. an ellipse. the equant. Copernicus' Heliocentric theory explains that Venus retrogrades when she overtakes us at inferior conjunction. all planets lie between the Sun and Earth. Mars will retrograde when it reaches a certain position on its epicycle. planetary orbits are elliptical in shape. the Sun lies at one focus of an ellipse. According to Copernicus, retrograde motion for Venus must occur around opposition, when the planet lies opposite the Sun in the sky. superior conjunction, when the planet is on the far side of the Sun. inferior conjunction, when it passes between us and the Sun. quadrature, when the planet is 90 degrees away from the Sun. greatest elongation, when the planet is farthest from the Sun. According to Copernicus, the retrograde motion for Mars must occur at inferior conjunction, when Mars laps the earth and passes between us and the Sun. at quadrature, when Mars lies exactly 90 degrees east or west of the Sun. at greatest elongation, when Mars can get up to 47 degrees from the Sun. at opposition, when the earth overtakes Mars and passes between Mars and the Sun. at superior conjunction, when Mars lies on the far side of the Sun. According to Newton's third law, when the Voyager probes passed Jupiter in 1979, they exerted exactly the same force on Jupiter as the giant planet did on them. True False Compared to when it was on the surface, a satellite in an orbit about 4 times the Earth's radius will experience about 1/16 the force due to gravity. True False According to Newton's second law, if you double the force acting on a body, the acceleration will double. True False According to Newton's first law, an object traveling in a circle does not have a force acting on it. True False Kepler's third law allows us to find the average distance to a planet from observing its period of rotation on its axis. True False According to Kepler's third law, if you know the planet's orbital period, you can find its average distance from the Sun. True False A planet (or comet) will speed up as it approaches the Sun True False

Deepwater Horizon Rig Oil Spill Monitoring

We thank NOAA, NASA and ESA for providing our society with such wonderful Earth observing satellite data.

FOR COPIES OF OLDER ANALYSES / IMAGES PLEASE CONTACT ROFFER'S OCEAN FISHING FORECASTING SERVICE (ROFFS™) VIA EMAIL OR AT (321) 723-5759

site last modified 22 JUNE 2010 - typically updated daily by 6PM EST

WRH permalink

---

Paris, France (SPX) Jun 17, 2010
A spectacular new image of the Sculptor Galaxy (NGC 253) has been taken with the ESO VISTA telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile as part of one of its first major observational campaigns.

By observing in infrared light VISTA's view is less affected by dust and reveals a myriad of cooler stars as well as a prominent bar of stars across the central region. The VISTA image provides much new information on the history and development of the galaxy.

The Sculptor Galaxy (NGC 253) lies in the constellation of the same name and is one of the brightest galaxies in the sky. It is prominent enough to be seen with good binoculars and was discovered by Caroline Herschel from England in 1783.

NGC 253 is a spiral galaxy that lies about 13 million light-years away. It is the brightest member of a small collection of galaxies called the Sculptor Group, one of the closest such groupings to our own Local Group of galaxies. Part of its visual prominence comes from its status as a starburst galaxy, one in the throes of rapid star formation.

NGC 253 is also very dusty, which obscures the view of many parts of the galaxy (eso0902). Seen from Earth, the galaxy is almost edge on, with the spiral arms clearly visible in the outer parts, along with a bright core at its centre.

VISTA, the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy, the latest addition to ESO's Paranal Observatory in the Chilean Atacama Desert, is the world's largest survey telescope. After being handed over to ESO at the end of 2009 (eso0949) the telescope was used for two detailed studies of small sections of the sky before it embarked on the much larger surveys that are now in progress.

One of these "mini surveys" was a detailed study of NGC 253 and its environment.

As VISTA works at infrared wavelengths it can see right through most of the dust that is such a prominent feature of the Sculptor Galaxy when viewed in visible light.

Huge numbers of cooler stars that are barely detectable with visible-light telescopes are now also seen. The VISTA view reveals most of what was hidden by the thick dust clouds in the central part of the disc and allows a clear view of a prominent bar of stars across the nuclear region - a feature that is not seen in visible light pictures. The majestic spiral arms now spread over the whole disc of the galaxy.

The spectacular viewing conditions VISTA shares with ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), located on the next mountain peak, also allow VISTA images to be exceptionally sharp for a ground-based telescope.

With this powerful instrument at their command astronomers wanted to peel away some of the mysteries of the Sculptor Galaxy. They are studying the myriad of cool red giant stars in the halo that surrounds the galaxy, measuring the composition of some of NGC 253's small dwarf satellite galaxies, and searching for as yet undiscovered new objects such as globular clusters and ultra-compact dwarf galaxies that would otherwise be invisible without the deep VISTA infrared images. Using the unique VISTA data they plan to map how the galaxy formed and has evolved.

Ithaca, N.Y. (UPI) Jun 11, 2010
A Cornell University expert on global positioning and satellite systems is warning they will be challenged as solar flare activity rises.

Paul Kintner.a professor of electrical and computer engineering, says an increasingly complex and brittle U.S. technical infrastructure has been created since 2004 -- a period of minimum solar flare activity. And during future periods of solar activity, those systems will be tested for the first time.

"We have been observing the sun during the space age for only 50 years and we do not fully understand its behavior, especially the extremes of its behavior," Kintner said. "In 2006 there was an eruption of solar radiation 100 times more intense than expected that temporarily silenced many GPS receivers over the sun-lit Earth. What is the ultimate limit of such eruptions of solar energy? Is it 1,000 times more intense, 10,000 times more intense? We just don't know."

Although the sun has been rather predictable during the past 50 or 60 years, it recently has become less predictable, Kintner said, noting such activity calls into question man's understanding of how the sun operates and the ability to predict its impact on technology.

"However, we do know that our increasingly more efficient infrastructure is also less robust and more vulnerable," he said. "Space weather -- such as the upcoming period of increased solar activity -- will … test the vulnerabilities of our communications and navigation infrastructure."

"A good heart is the Sun and the Moon; or, rather, the Sun and not the Moon, for it shines bright and never changes." -William Shakespeare

Did I ever tell you how lucky you are?

Lucky, indeed, to have the Sun for a star?

Our Sun -- the ultimate source of all the light, heat, energy, and life on our world -- is remarkable in how constant it is. In fact, we didn't even know just how constant it was until we launched the SOHO satellite, shown below.

SOHO has just released their results from more than 12 years of observing the Sun from space, and found that the size of the Sun has been constant to within 0.003% over that entire timespan!

This accuracy is unprecedented. The scary thing is, it didn't need to be that way.

There are plenty of stars that change their size dramatically over short periods of time. (Like Chi Cygni, above.) In fact, there are a whole slew of astronomers who study only these objects: variable stars. (Check out the AAVSO for more info.)

Sure, there are plenty of stars that get brighter and dimmer because of things like sunspots, or having another star pass in front of it, or other external phenomena.

That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about stars that actually grow and shrink over time, periodically getting dimmer and brighter intrinsically.

This really happens, and it happens for lots of different stars, just some of which are shown below.

While our Sun is nearly completely constant in size and changes by just one-thousandth of a magnitude in brightness, there are stars that "pulse" and change their brightness by huge amounts. By so much, in fact, that if our Sun were to do this, the Earth would alternately freeze and boil multiple times every year!

Why's this? What's going on with these stars that makes them so different from our Sun?

Our Sun, like all stars, really has only two things in play that determine what's going on. On one hand, there's gravity, trying to pull the Sun in on itself, trying to collapse it down as far as it'll go. But on the other hand, the Sun produces energy in its core by burning its Hydrogen fuel into Helium, through nuclear fusion. That process releases a bunch of energy, which makes its way to the surface and eventually reaches us as sunlight.

The spectacular thing about this is that the outward pressure of this radiation exactly balances the force of gravity, and that's why the Sun maintains its constant size!

And this is true for most stars that burn hydrogen into helium. But this isn't the case for all stars, and it isn't always going to be the case for our Sun, either! Why not?

Because at some point, we're going to run out of fuel in the core! When that happens, that outward pressure drops to a much lower value, but the force of gravity is still huge!

What happens then? Your beautiful star, which stayed just about the same size for billions of years, suddenly starts to collapse in on itself!

But the more you collapse, the denser you get, and the denser you get, the easier it becomes for atoms to find each other and fuse together again! So the following cycle happens:

• you gravitationally collapse, and get smaller,
• atoms start to find each other and nuclear fusion skyrockets,
• which increases the pressure and brightness tremendously,
• which pushes the star outwards, making it less dense inside,
• which makes it harder for atoms to find each other, bringing fusion and brightness down,
• which causes you to gravitationally collapse, and get smaller,

and the cycle repeats!

That's what a variable star does, in a nutshell, and damn, aren't you glad the Sun isn't one!

So the next time you're lamenting how "boring" the Sun is with its constant size, tiny sunspots and flares, and energy output that varies by less than 0.1% over the entire measured history of the Sun, don't cry too hard. The very gentleness of our nuclear furnace is what allows you to be here in the first place!

Read the comments on this post...

Tokyo, Japan (SPX) May 28, 2010 - A joint Japan-United States research team has identified the origin of the white light emission in solar flares. The team, led by Dr. Kyoko Watanabe, an aerospace project research associate at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, made its discovery by quantitatively analyzing an X-class solar flare, which was observed by two successive, solar-observing satellites: Hinode and the NASA SMEX mission RHESSI.

The origin of the white light emission had not been clarified since its first discovery about 150 years ago.

A solar flare is the most energetic explosion observed in the solar system. Different ways of viewing solar flares include X-rays, radio and chromospheric spectral lines. A large percentage of flares are recognized as a result of associated brightening in the visible light spectrum, and thus are called white light flares.

British astronomer Richard Carrington made the first observation of solar flares in 1859 by sketching details of sunspots, including bright features that at times corresponded to white light emissions. However, the occurrence of such emissions is infrequent, leaving the mechanism for their creation unclear.

The Solar Optical Telescope, aboard the solar observing satellite Hinode, provides the white light images, allowing scientists for the first time to accurately study the brightness and its time variations. The Hinode observations completed so far indicate that many solar flares are accompanied by white light emissions. Hinode was launched on Sept. 23, 2006 by JAXA, in partnership with NASA and in collaboration with space-agency partners in the United Kingdom, Norway, Europe and Japan's National Astronomical Observatory.

White light emissions were observed by the Solar Optical Telescope during an X-class flare that occurred at 22:09 UT on Dec. 14, 2006. The RHESSI satellite simultaneously recorded hard X-ray emissions, an indicator of non-thermal electrons accelerated by solar flares. The team found that the spatial location and temporal change of white light emissions are correlated with those of hard X-ray emissions.

Moreover, the energy of white light emissions is equivalent to the energy supplied by all the electrons accelerated to above 40 keV (~40 percent of the light speed). This finding strongly suggests that highly accelerated electrons are responsible for producing white light emissions.

Hard X-rays are emitted when accelerated electrons impact the dense atmosphere near the solar surface. Normally, white light emissions primarily come from the solar surface, whereas 40 keV electrons can penetrate into the atmosphere about 1,000 km above the solar surface, i.e., the chromosphere.

Particle acceleration is one of the many mysteries surrounding solar flares. Modeling energy transfer of high-energy particles in the solar atmosphere is an important subject for further improving human understanding of particle acceleration.

Highly accelerated particles may travel toward the Earth and cause geomagnetic storms, resulting in impacts to Earth-orbiting hardware and human activity on the surface.

Now, as solar activity gradually increases after a very long period of minimal high energy activity, solar physicists are hoping the increased solar activity will provide Hinode with additional opportunities to observe solar flares and extend its observations.

Hinode is a collaborative mission with NASA and the space agencies of Japan, the United Kingdom, Norway and Europe and Japan's National Astronomical Observatory. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages Hinode science operations and oversaw development of the scientific instrumentation provided for the mission by NASA, industry and other federal agencies.

The Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, Calif., is the lead U.S. investigator for the Solar Optical Telescope. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., is the lead American investigator for the X-ray Telescope.

Hampton VA (SPX) May 19, 2010 - The air we breathe doesn't always come from our own backyard. In fact, sometimes it doesn't even come from our neighbors. On April 22, 2010, a NASA satellite captured the appearance of a large dust cloud over the eastern coast of United States that originated on the other side of the world - in China.

"Dust can stimulate the production of more clouds, altering local weather and potentially the climate," said Zhoayan Liu, a researcher at the National Institute of Aerospace and NASA's Langley Research Center who is monitoring the dust movement. The dust cloud was in upper troposphere, the atmospheric layer in which we live.

The dust plume that arrived in the U.S. maintained an average size of more than 1,200 miles wide and six miles tall as it traveled across the Earth. It began in China's Taklimakan and Gobi Deserts, and over 10 days, NASA captured the dust moving across the Pacific Ocean, through the United States and Canada and over Virginia.

"It is likely that a cold front over the deserts generated strong surface winds that pushed a large amount of the dust into the atmosphere and from there the jet streams brought it across the world," said Liu.

Liu and his colleagues at NASA discovered the relocation of the dust after analyzing data from Langley's Earth observing satellite CALIPSO (Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations). It can be difficult to distinguish dust from regular clouds and other types of aerosols in photographs taken from space.

CALIPSO, however, measures vertical profiles of the atmosphere and produces data that makes a distinction between the different particle types in our atmosphere, such as clouds, smoke, or dust. Not only can it tell scientists what is in our air, CALIPSO can also identify the vertical and horizontal location of the particles as well.

To validate what the satellite saw, NASA scientists took to the sky with the NASA King Air B200 aircraft and a lidar instrument similar to the one on CALIPSO.

Aboard the plane, scientists were able to take the same measurements as CALIPSO over North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania. The local flights, which took place the same day and time that the satellite detected the dust, confirmed what the satellite observed.

"This transport of dust out of China happens every spring, but we rarely see it move this far with such intensity," said Raymond Rogers, a Langley scientist who participated in the local flights.

The air is always made up of various kinds of particles, but it is uncommon that those particles relocate in such large amounts that can their origin can be visibly tracked.

Rogers and Liu said that using CALIPSO and local airborne measurements to monitor the presence of dust in our atmosphere will provide others with data that can be used to gain a better understanding of how dust impacts humans and ecosystems.

Paris, France (ESA) May 14, 2010 - While ESA's Proba-2 keeps its main instruments trained on the Sun, it is also looking back to its homeworld. This wide-angle view of Earth comes from an experimental camera that is smaller than an espresso cup.

The Exploration Camera (X-Cam) is carried on the underside of Proba-2, one of 17 new technologies being tested by the mini-satellite. Observing in the visible and near-infrared with a 100 degrees field-of-view, its monochrome images resemble what an astronaut might see if elevated to Proba-2's 800 km orbit.

X-Cam was designed by Swiss company Micro-Cameras and Space Exploration. It is the latest in a series of miniature cameras built by the company for previous ESA missions including Proba-1, SMART-1 and Rosetta.

"X-Cam has a lot of components, capability and embedded intelligence we need to test," said Stephane Beauvivre of Micro-Cameras and Space Exploration.

"It's really designed for exploration, which means we won't know what scene we're looking at, how far away it is and what exposure time is best. Rather than relying on trial and error, the camera's intelligence makes sophisticated 'automatic' exposures, offering onboard quality control to deliver the best possible images. It also includes a lot of memory, which we need to check will stand up to prolonged radiation exposure.

"The opportunity to fly in this way aboard Proba-2 is very valuable. In our business, the only real technology demonstrations are in space - not guesses or ground tests but actual spaceflight."

Similar compact imagers could in future keep watch on satellite surfaces to look out for damage or environmental effects. Micro-Cameras and Space Exploration will also fly cameras on ESA's ExoMars and BepiColombo science missions.

And in 2014 their miniature imager on Rosetta's lander should provide us with our closest view yet of a comet's surface.

Notes for editors



Contacts

Janet Anderson
NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Alabama, USA
Phone: +1-256-544-6162
Email: janet.l.anderson@nasa.gov

Megan Watzke
Chandra X-ray Center, Cambridge, Mass., USA
Phone: +1-617-496-7998
Email: mwatzke@cfa.harvard.edu

Norbert Schartel, ESA XMM-Newton Project Scientist
Directorate of Science and Robotic Exploration
European Space Agency
Email: Norbert.Schartel@esa.int

When passing over the South magnetic Pole, the compass needle wobbles. The plane is ferrying passengers over Antarctica on a one-day air tour. If the passengers were able to see what was below them thousands of meters down, they would be in awe at the scalloped sea ice which has been carved into beautiful shapes by the icy winds and waves. Clearly, even from the plane, snow can be seen blowing toward the water. Some look like steam, floating across the glacier's frozen white wasteland.

The first explorers to make the full trek to the South Pole had to walk, hike and sled over the treacherous and deadly landscape in 1909. It took them over 130 days to travel over 2,000 miles. Leaving, under four short hours ago, the tourists, seated comfortably on the jumbo jet, are now flying over the pole, and will marvel at the natural beauty of this final wilderness left on the Earth, as they take in the antarctic landscape for a few hours, before heading back to to complete their round trip.

Compasses are affected by the lines of magnetic force that converge at this point in the Southern Hemisphere. This is what is known as the Magnetic South Pole. Staying on course is easy for the jet because it has satellite guidance, as well as a gyroscope. More people are aware of the geographic South Pole, which was reached in the early 1900?s. It is about 2,500 kilometers from the magnetic South Pole. Similar to the airman who claimed the first flights over both the North and South Poles in the 1920?s, passengers on this flight can claim they achieved their destiny while sitting down.

Outside, the Antarctic winds quickly begin to whip past the plane windows. But, the cabin inside the plane is perfect, so you can easily travel to the Antarctic in jeans, a t-shirt and flip-flops, if you wanted to! From the time that they observed their first icebergs, when they were about three hours south of, these passengers have been enjoying a raucous celebration. Each of the tourists, which range in age from children to seniors, stroll the aisles of the plane, hoping to find the perfect viewing spot for observing icebergs from above.

More and more icebergs enter the scene as you near the Antarctic coast, fitting together like a jigsaw puzzle, irregular white shapes against the deep blue background of the sea. You shoot a video of the beautiful, alien scene and admire the majestic sight as glaciers come into view, covering the land and extending into the sea. You're also awed as the Transantarctic Mountains appear, with their stunning white ice cover gleaming against the blue of the sky.

In the past, two major airlines offered regular flights for tourists over Antarctica. Not only do the passengers get to see the glaciers, mountains, coasts and icebergs, but they can also fly over an abandoned French research base. It used to be a penguin colony before the French took over. A tidal wave later destroyed the base. You reflect on the exotic and majestic sights that you have viewed as your flight turns back toward, and, curiously, you suddenly recall that geologists were the first people to reach the South Magnetic Pole many years ago.

CONTACTS:

Dr. Mario M. Bisi
Institute of Mathematics and Physics (IMAPS)
Aberystwyth University
Wales
United Kingdom
E-Mail: Mario.Bisi@aber.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1970 622809
Mob: +44 (0)7818 073176
Web: http://www.spacephysicist.com/

Dr. Andrew R. Breen
Institute of Mathematics and Physics (IMAPS)
Aberystwyth University
Wales
United Kingdom
E-Mail: azb@aber.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1970 622814
Web: http://users.aber.ac.uk/azb/

Dr. Bernard V. Jackson
Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences
University of California, San Diego
California
USA
E-Mail: bvjackson@ucsd.edu
Tel: +1 858 534 3358
Web: http://cass.ucsd.edu/Directory/profile_faculty.php?user=bvjackson

NAM 2010 Press Office (12th – 16th April only)
Room G358
Gilbert Scott Building
University of Glasgow.
Tel: +44 (0)141 330 7409, +44 (0)141 330 7410, +44 (0)141 330 7411

Dr. Robert Massey
Press and Policy Officer
Royal Astronomical Society
Mob: +44 (0)794 124 8035
E-mail: rm@ras.org.uk

Anita Heward
Press Officer
Royal Astronomical Society
Mob: +44 (0)7756 034 243
E-mail: anitaheward@btopenworld.com

The full results of the study will appear in a paper in Solar Physics in the upcoming Topical Issue (TI) on “Remote Sensing of the Inner Heliosphere” (Drs. Mario M. Bisi and Andrew R. Breen will be Guest Editors for this TI).

Institute of Mathematics and Physics (IMAPS), Aberystwyth University: http://www.aber.ac.uk/en/imaps/

Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences (CASS), University of California, San Diego (UCSD): http://cass.ucsd.edu/


University of Hawaii (Institute for Astronomy): http://alshamess.ifa.hawaii.edu/sdc01/sfc_cme.php
STELab IPS: http://stesun5.stelab.nagoya-u.ac.jp/ips_data-e.html
CASS UCSD IPS 3-D Reconstructions: http://ips.ucsd.edu/
EISCAT: http://www.eiscat.com/
MERLIN: http://www.merlin.ac.uk/
Predictive Science, Inc. (PredSci): http://www.predsci.com/
Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL): http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/
Solar Physics: http://www.springer.com/astronomy/astrophysics+and+astroparticles/journal/11207
Astrophysical Letters (Ap. J. Letters): http://iopscience.iop.org/2041-8205

NOTES FOR EDITORS

“On March 21, 2010, the Red River crested at 36.99 feet (11.27 meters), according to the National Weather Service. NASA’s Earth Observing-1 satellite captured these images of fields north of Fargo on March 21, 2010. The Sheyenne, Red, and Buffalo Rivers all flow through the area pictured here. The false-color image (top) combines visible and [...]

No, not Terra the Earth, Terra the satellite. NASA’s Earth-observing bird first opened its eyes on February 24, 2000, and for the past decade has been dutifully watching our planet. It has looked upon us at different wavelengths, different resolutions, at different times of day, and different times of year. It has tracked changes, and [...]

15 Vote(s)

No, not Terra the Earth, Terra the satellite. NASA’s Earth-observing bird first opened its eyes on February 24, 2000, and for the past decade has been dutifully watching our planet. It has looked upon us at different wavelengths, different resolutions, at different times of day, and different times of year. It has tracked changes, and [...]

I know I just posted a volcano image from the Terra Earth-observing satellite, but another just came in and it’s so beautiful I can’t help myself. So here’s a little bit of awesome for your Friday afternoon. Behold! See? Told you. What we have here are two volcanoes on February 13 erupting simultaneously in Kamchatka. The [...]

The ESA  has scheduled the launch of Cryosat-2 for February 25th aboard a Russian Dnepr rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. This is the second attempt at launching the Earth-observing satellite that's tasked with monitoring global ice thickness. The initial launch of Cryosat on October 8th, 2005 failed due to an anomaly of the [...]

Nasa launched its Solar Dynamics Observatory successfully from Cape Canaveral today. The timing - coinciding with the sun's awakening from the longest quiet spell for a century - is perfect. The SDO will observe variations in solar activity, to help scientists predict "space weather" better. Violent bursts of activity, such as solar flares and "coronal mass ejections" (CMEs), can disrupt satellites, communications and power systems on Earth. And a good warning can reduce the damage. The recent minimum in the 11-year solar cycle has lasted longer and been quieter than experts had expected. Over the past two years, more than 250 days have had no sunspots at all. Some people were even speculating that the sun might be entering a period of inactivity lasting several decades, similar to the Maunder Minimum of the 17th century. But the past month has seen a renewed burst of solar flares, suggesting that the cycle is on an upward curve toward a likely maximum in 2013.

"NASA looks into space from the Earth, but it also looks at Earth from space. The agency builds and operates Earth-observing satellites and conducts research using complex climate modeling and simulation programs. The agency is looking for ways to speed development and expand access to those tools...."

Kudos to the American Geological Institute's Government Affair Program for their continuing great work - here is their summary of the geoscience related items in the newly released federal budget proposal for FY11:

President Obama released the Administration’s budget request for fiscal year 2011 (FY11) on February 1, 2010. Of the $3.8 trillion requested for the U.S. government, here are some highlights of what is being requested for geosciences. The American Geological Institute’s Government Affairs Program will be preparing more detailed summaries and tables of requested geoscience funding in the near future through special email updates and our appropriation web pages.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is requested to receive $7.4 billion, an increase of 8 percent (+$550 million) over FY10.  Much of the increase would be for research with some emphasis on energy and sustainability. A smaller 2 percent increase is requested for NSF’s education and training programs. A major new NSF-wide initiative is called Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability (SEES) which is budgeted at $766 million. The funds will be pulled from across the different directorates and the Geosciences will contribute $231 million for the initiative.

The Geosciences Directorate would receive an increase of 7.4 percent (+$65.6 million) for a total budget of $955.3 million. Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences would receive $281 million (+8.1 percent), Ocean Sciences would receive $378 million (+8.3 percent) and Earth Sciences would receive $199 million (+8.7 percent). EarthScope would receive $26 million (+3.8 percent) and the Ocean Observatories Initiative would receive $27.5 million (+66.7 percent).

The U.S. Geological Survey is requested to receive $1.1 billion, an increase of $21.6 million over FY10. Major increases would include +$3 million for the New Energy Frontier Initiative, +$11 million for the Climate Change Adaptation Initiative, +9 million for the WaterSMART Program, +$3.6 million for work in Chesapeake Bay as part of the Treasured Landscape Initiative,  +$13.4 million for the Landsat Data Continuity Mission, +$4.7 million for hazards, +$13.9 million for the Global Change Program and +$4 million for marine spatial planning through a partnership with the Minerals Management Service.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is requested to receive $19 billion, a increase of 4 percent (+$700 million) over FY10. The Constellation program, to build the Orion spacecraft and Ares rocket, and manned lunar missions would be eliminated. The termination of Constellation leaves the U.S. with a likely multi-year gap in human spaceflight capabilities. The three space shuttles will be retired at the end of this year and the U.S. will depend on Russian spaceflights to support the International Space Station. NASA would like to transition to commercially operated spaceflights.

NASA’s Science Directorate would receive $5 billion, an increase of 8 percent ($540 million). Earth Science would receive $1,420.7 million (+$44 million). NASA would also focus on building Earth-observing satellites. About $170 million would be for replacing the failed Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO). About $150 million would be used to accelerate the development of new satellites for Earth Science priorities.

The Department of Energy is requested to receive $28.4 billion, an increase of 1.4 percent (+$406 million) compared to FY10. The Office of Science would receive $5.1 billion for an increase of $218 million. The Advanced Research Projects in Energy (ARPA-E) would receive $300 million, an additional $40 million would go to existing Energy Frontier Research Centers, an additional $107 million would go to Energy Innovation Hubs and RE-ENERGYSE would get $74 million. The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy would receive $2.4 billion (+$113 million), Fossil Energy Programs would receive $586 million (-$86 million) and Nuclear Energy would receive $824 million (+$37 million).

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is requested to receive $919 million, an increase of 7.3 percent over FY10.  Scientific and Technical Research and Services would receive $585 million (+$54 million).

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is requested to receive a huge increase of $164 million for competitively awarded research programs for a total research budget of $429 million for FY11.

While high over the grasslands of Kazakhstan, the Terra Earth-observing satellite saw something interesting… can you spot it in this image? Not so easy, is it? But if you look just left of center you’ll see this: See it there, right in the center? It’s the Chiyli impact crater, an ancient scar from a cosmic collision. The [...]

While high over the grasslands of Kazakhstan, the Terra Earth-observing satellite saw something interesting… can you spot it in this image?Not so easy, is it? But if you look just left of center you’ll see this:See it there, right in the center? It’s the Chiyli impact crater, an ancient scar from a cosmic collision. The [...]

6 Vote(s)

Contact:

Dave Finley, Public Information Officer
Socorro, NM
(575) 835-7302
dfinley@nrao.edu

The image above, from the NASA Earth Observatory, shows ongoing activity at Turrialba volcano, Costa Rica, captured by the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) aboard NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite on 21 January 2010. The damage caused to vegetation to the west of the volcano’s summit by acidic gas emissions is clearly visible. Hazy grey-blue fumes [...]

The media missed the real story about the so-called “climate-gate” scandal.

fter thousands of emails were mysteriously stolen from the University of East Anglia and distributed just before the climate conference in Copenhagen, many news outlets seemed content to report the story as it was presented to them rather than bothering to read the emails in the context they were written.

A closer look at these candid messages reveals a very different problem than the supposed scientific conspiracy theory that’s been in high rotation in the media. This previously unreported story also shows why launching the long-mothballed Deep Space Climate Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) is more urgent now than ever.

Lets start with perhaps the most widely distributed and misunderstood of the stolen emails, of October 12, 2009 from Dr. Keith Trenberth to Michael Mann, which reads:

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.

<!--break-->

Out of more than a thousand emails dating back 13 years, this single sentence was seized on by some commentators as evidence that decades of climate research by hundreds of scientists is instead a global conspiracy.

If you are going to put that much weight on a single email, you may as well finish reading it. Here’s what Trenberth says in the following sentence:

The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Allow me to translate this dense jargon into English. CERES stands for Clouds and the Earth s Radiant Energy System – a five-satellite network launched by NASA dating back to 1997 to monitor heat flow in the upper atmosphere.

The story you haven’t heard is that scientists can’t get the numbers to add up using existing climate satellites. After billions of research dollars spent and over a decade of trying, the energy budget of planet as measured by CERES and other low- Earth orbit satellite systems is out of whack by about 6 watts per square meter.

That stubborn error in the satellite data is about six times larger than what is scientifically possible, and several times larger than the effect scientists are trying to see, namely planetary warming caused by continued massive emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

While this is a very big deal, it does NOT remotely suggest that climate change is a hoax. For evidence of that, you don’t need a satellite, you can look out your kitchen window.

Sea ice is disappearing from the arctic so fast it could be gone forever in as little as 30 years. The Met Office predicts 2010 may be the hottest year on record and that this decade was the hottest ever “by far”. Australia is currently enduring the hottest six months since record keeping began in the 1800’s.

What Trenberth is saying in this now infamous email is that it is a “travesty” that scientists cannot accurately measure from space what is plainly obvious here on Earth. More than that, he is lamenting that our “observing system” is inadequate to be able to accurately balance the planet’s energy budget.

Dr. Trenberth is one of the world’s most respected climate researchers. To hear him directly explain this problem himself, have a look at this video. If you happen to have a PhD in atmospheric physics (or just have trouble sleeping) you may also want to read his thorough research paper on the topic.

It’s not that the CERES experiment is a bad project or staffed by incompetent people. But the fact of the matter is that our satellite systems have failed to provide coherent data to explain the defining issue of the 21^st century. This important but esoteric problem is largely unknown to the public, but widely acknowledged within the scientific community.

So what’s the problem with the data? In science, such unexplained phenomena are not a “problem” – they are the most interesting things to look at. They reveal clues about things we don’t yet fully understand, or hint that long-accepted methods of measurement need to be reassessed.

Which brings us back to the limitations of CERES and other low Earth orbit instruments. These satellites are traveling at more than seven kilometers a second and see our planet in thin strips as narrow as ten kilometers wide. Most take about 24 hours to get back where they started.

From this vantage it is like trying to map an elephant using a microscope. By the time you look at the same spot twice, the Earth (and the elephant) is doing something else.

There are far better instruments for observing elephants: Binoculars.

The long-mothballed DSCOVR spacecraft, still languishing in clean storage here on Earth, is just such an instrument. Rather than seeing the planet from hundreds of kilometers away, DSCOVR was designed to track our orbit around the Sun from 1.5 million kilometers away.

From a unique gravitational dimple called “L1”, the spacecraft would continuously monitor the entire sunlit disc of our planet, providing an entirely new way of collecting data on the Earth’s energy budget. This coincident data would compliment and calibrate more detailed measurements from CERES and other satellites that observe the Earth from much closer.

Yet of the $160 billion given to NASA from the US taxpayer since DSCOVR was built in 2000, they have stubbornly maintained that launching this already fully completed spacecraft is either too expensive or simply not important. 

For the record, the most inflated estimate to launch and operate DSCOVR of $250 million would represent 0.15% of that public largesse. In fact, the true cost to NASA to operate DSCOVR for seven years is likely less than $50 million due to cost sharing opportunities with other agencies, and use of cheaper launch vehicles such as a SpaceX rocket.

The reasons for NASA's apparent resistance to exploring new methods of Earth observation probably have more to do with internal bureaucratic inertia than anything else. As they say, old dogs have a hard time learning new tricks and NASA has being doing low Earth orbit for more than forty years. 

They recently committed a further $1 billion on a low Earth orbit replacement to CERES called CLARREO that won't be launched until at least 2016. Whether or not this experiment will finally make the numbers add up remains to be seen, and the results will not be known for another six years at the earliest.

In the meantime, climate change proceeds apace, "skeptics" make specious arguments using glaring errors in the satellite data, and DSCOVR dozes in its storage box here on Earth waiting for 1/20th of the money required for a re-do the failed CERES experiment.

If there is a bright side to the sinister theft of thousands of emails just before the Copenhagen Conference, it is that we can now start to have a more intelligent conversation on the glaring discrepancies in our Earth observation instruments.

And lets not be too hard on NASA. After eight years of George Bush in the Whitehouse and billions diverted from worthwhile science towards inter-planetary photo ops like the manned mission to Mars, the space agency is understandably just now picking up the pieces.

The fabulously expensive (and scientifically useless) International Space Station will also have funneled off $140 billion in scarce research dollars when it finally plunges into the ocean in 2016.

These outside political pressures forced NASA to drop so many Earth-observing missions that by 2006 leading scientists were warning our climate monitoring system was “at risk of collapse”. Four years later, the public was granted a rare glimpse of the frustration within the scientific community in Trenberth’s now famously misinterpreted message.

What about the stolen emails and global conspiracy theories? I suggest a more plausible alternative: The next time the media encounters a such an obvious stick being thrown for them, maybe they should instead chase the mysterious person doing the throwing.

As for DSCOVR, it is interesting that an experiment that could help resolve glaring uncertainties abound this century’s defining issue has somehow never been launched.

For some powerful interests far beyond NASA, continued uncertainty can be a very valuable commodity. To quote a notorious leaked strategy document from Big Tobacco when they were seeking to delay costly regulation of their dangerous industry in the 1960’s: “doubt is our product.”

Next post: DeSmog Blog talks to leading scientists about the DSCOVR mission.

Image of the day for 7 January 2010 at the NASA Earth Observatory is this view of Soufrière Hills volcano on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, captured by the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) aboard NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite on 29 December 2009. The image clearly shows how the deposits from the debris flows radiating out [...]

On these pages I often write about the more exotic things that can be seen in our universe. I talk about the feeling of success when I have located a particular object that is not so easy to detect. Or maybe I try to describe the feeling of seeing a very deep sky object that shows up in a telescope in such a way that is hard for the none-telescope observer to understand. But today, I want to extol the virtues of simply going outside on a clear night and seeing whatever there may be to see with the naked eye or in some instances with the aid of a decent set of binoculars.

More than 690 kilometers above the surface of the planet, the satellites making up the A-Train trail each other endlessly, several times each day. Their purpose is to keep a close tab on each other, and to function on a sun-synchronous orbit. They are spaced several seconds up to several minutes apart, and provide mission controllers with a wealth of meteorological and atmospheric data, including pressure readings, temperatures, precipitation levels, soil moisture and so on. One of the Train's components, the PARASOL satellite, is now about to get switched to another “track.”At this point, the Afternoon Train contains five NASA satellites, namely Aqua, CloudSat, CALIPSO, PARASOL and AURA. The OCO component, which was scheduled to take off in February, 2009, failed before it reached orbit, and its successor, an instrument called Glory, has yet to be launched. But experts at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) now plan to switch the French-built Earth observing research satellite PARASOL (Polarization and Anisotropy of Reflectances for Atmospheric Sciences coupled with Observations from a Lidar) to a different position in the sky.The French Space Agency (CNES), which manages the satellite, announced that the commands to take PARASOL off the A-Train were uploaded to the spacecraft's navigation system a...