Space videos
NASA’s screen-cast of the recent drop in solar (sunspot and flare) activity and the now expected cyclical shift back up, as solar activity starts to pick up again. As per the NASA-NOAA prediction panel which is comprised of leading solar physicists, this could lead to an upcoming mini solar maximum cycle in 2014.
On March 29, 2014, there was a significant solar event where an x-class flare burst off the right side of the sun. Several NASA spacecraft, a ground based telescope and five observatories were tasked with studying the solar flare and the coronal mass ejection (cme). This NASA hangout/discussion includes Jeffrey Newmark from the NASA Headquarters; Adrian Daw who is the IRIS project scientist at NASA Goddard; Albert Shih, the RHESSI scientist at NASA Goddard; Sabrina Savage, the Hinode deputy project scientist at NASA Marshall and Lucia Kleint from the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute. These scientists and researchers describe how multiple NASA and other organizations and missions worked together to explore the sun’s surface and atmosphere, providing us with some of the unprecedented images of the onset of a solar flare.
The planet Mercury, which lies closest to the Sun has an exosphere instead of an atmosphere that includes oxygen, sodium, hydrogen, helium, potassium and other trace chemicals. Astrophysicist Eylene Pirez, who is a researcher at the Particle Beam Physics Lab (PBPL) at UCLA, provides a more detailed breakdown of the chemical gases that are found in Mercury’s exosphere.
The head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office, Dr. Bill Cooke, talks about a US wide network of fireball observatories that photograph/record and document meteors and any other space bodies that burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere everyday. Dr. Cooke and other meteor observers will be out in full force watching the skies on May 23-24, 2014 as meteor shower activity will be heightened with Earth passing through a cosmic cloud of dust and debris from the (relatively) recently discovered periodic comet 209P/LINEAR. Should provide an exciting and hopefully harmless light show in the night sky.
NASA conducted an exploration forum this week where several administrators, scientists and other NASA personnel outlined how this US space agency plans to land human astronauts first on an asteroid and then Mars. They hope accomplish the manned Mars mission by 2030. One can speculate whether unofficial work has already been done for such initiatives but this does mark an important point in NASA’s public push to take humans to outer space – the first one since the mission to put man on the moon.
The full presentation is long (2.5 hours) but worth watching for space enthusiasts and budding, future astronauts 🙂