What a real spaceship would look like

Or could look like, based on technology we already have or have within our grasp:



The video is from 2011, so no doubt there have been many revisions since. A similar, but more advanced looking ship was used in the movie The Martian. No doubt based on this design.



So when are we going to see this ship for real? Not in my lifetime, I expect. In a world where industrialized, technologically advanced nations are over budget, bordering on bankruptcy and/or currency collapse, I don't realistically see funding for projects like this for a long, long time. If ever. It may remain just a dream, only fulfilled in movies. CGI special effects are so much cheaper than reality.

For more photos from the movie, and commentary of the science, follow this link: SCIENCING THE MARTIAN
     

An amazing photo of the U.K.

I love this photo:

It's from this article: The Brexit Won't Happen, Buy The British Pound, which is about whether or not the U.K. will exit the European Union:

[...] Although the Brexit vote is some way off, we still feel an exit from the European Union is not going to eventuate. Because of this we have taken advantage of the lower pound and increased our long position.

Boris Johnson may be charismatic and popular with the people, ourselves included, but he is also considered quite wacky, so to speak. We feel many of the British public will take his view that the United Kingdom should exit the European Union with a pinch of salt, and don't consider him to be a true threat here. [...]

But the photo is amazing. Click on it to look at it in it's full size. You can still see the sky above the horizon, so I suspect it was taken from the very upper reaches of the outer stratosphere. So beautiful.

   

Auroras tonight, and Wednesday?

Looks like it. This was Iowa from the early morning hours today:



Look up! Another solar storm may supercharge auroras Wednesday

While a "severe" solar storm that sparked dazzling auroras around the world on Monday through Tuesday morning is dying down now, skywatchers shouldn't stop looking up quite yet.

Another potentially powerful solar tempest is expected to impact Earth on Wednesday into Thursday, and it could create more amazing auroras for people in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.

In particular, the next solar storm is especially well aimed to enhancing aurora activity over North America, according to experts at the National Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) in Boulder, Colorado.

Monday's solar storm hit the G4 or "severe" level, a relatively rare class of storm that can create bright auroras in relatively low latitudes. Such G4 storms — the rating scale goes up to G5 — can also cause problems with power grids on Earth and harm satellites in space.

And another storm of that severe magnitude is likely on its way to Earth now.

Scientists at the SWPC are anticipating that the solar storm predicted to arrive Wednesday could, yet again, produce beautiful auroras in relatively low latitudes.

At the moment, the SWPC is predicting a G3 or "strong" storm on Wednesday and Thursday, but that was the forecast for Monday, as well. [...]

See the whole article for embedded links, photos, videos and more.

For more technical details, and an Aurora Prediction map, see the NOAA website: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/

   

A real "Warp Drive" for Space Travel

I had posted about this previously. Here is a video, talking about a possible prototype, if experiments on earth justify further research:



     

A propulsion drive without fuel?

Yes, and it may take us to Mars:

EmDrive Is an Engine That Breaks the Laws of Physics and Could Take Us to Mars

An experimental engine is gaining acceptance among scientists, and could introduce a new era of space travel — it only had to break a law of physics to do so.

The picture, below, is of the EmDrive. It uses electricity to generate microwaves, which then bounce around in a closed space and generate thrust. The drive does not need propellant, an important part of current space-travel mechanics.

The force generated by the drive is not particularly strong, but the implications are big. Multiple independent experiments have now replicated the drive's ability to generate thrust, albeit with varying success. Using panels to convert solar energy into electricity and then into thrust, opens the door to perpetual space travel fueled by the stars.

Scientists were slow to warm up to the EmDrive since it violates the law of the conservation of momentum. In addition to not being sure why it works — current theories rely on quantum mechanics — scientists also have some pretty good ideas why it shouldn't work. [...]

Follow the link for pics, video and embedded links.
     

If cosmic rays could play classical music instruments...

Oh, wait a minute! They can:

NASA Moon Probe Broadcasts Space Weather Symphony Live Online

A NASA probe orbiting the moon is broadcasting live cosmic tunes from a computer near you.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has a new internet radio station for people who want to check out space weather through music. Operating in real time — as long as the craft isn't behind the moon — the station plays music that changes in pitch and instrument based on how much radiation the spacecraft experiences.

"Our minds love music, so this offers a pleasurable way to interface with the data," project leader Mary Quinn of the University of New Hampshire, Durham, said in a statement. "It also provides accessibility for people with visual impairment."



Cloudy, with a chance of B-flat

Launched in 2009, LRO orbits the moon as it maps its surface. The craft carries with it a Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation, or CRaTER. Six detectors on the instrument measure the radiation from solar activity and galactic cosmic rays.

The detectors measure how many energetic particles are registered each second and sends the information to CRaTER Live Radio, where software converts the measurements into pitches in a four-octave scale. Six pitches are played each second — one for each detector. Low pitches indicate high activity, while higher pitches indicate lower counts.

As activity increases, the musical instruments scale as well. The main instrument at the lowest level of activity is a piano. Two instruments up, it becomes a marimba. Further activity is indicated by a steel drum or a guitar, while the peak of normal activity is indicated by the strum of a banjo.

During the course of a significant solar event such as a solar flare, radiation activity may exceed the normal operating range. In such a case, the software creates a second operating range with the piano at the bottom and banjo at the top, but the background violin and cello scales. A drop in pitch for the background instruments indicates a move to the secondary range.

24-hours of space tunes

LRO broadcasts 24 hours, and is live at all times except when the craft travels behind the moon. During this blackout period, the station reuses the previous hour's activity, changing the sound of the background bongo drum and muting the chiming triangle.

The process, known as sonofication, converts data into sound and has been utilized in a number of fields on a variety of missions, including Voyager 1, Voyager 2 and Kepler. [...]

The actual website you can listen to it on live, is here:

CRaTER Live Internet Radio Station Sonification/Music Design

Give the page a minute or two to load. In the upper left hand corner is a sound bar that controls the music, it should start playing automatically. The site has a lot of detailed information about how it all works.

I've checked it out a few times. The "Music" is probably more ambient than musical, though it can vary a considerable degree, depending on the space weather. Sometimes it sounds more pleasant than others.

Your mileage may vary! ;-)


     

The Moonbase That Almost Was

Moonbase Apollo (1968)

[...] Not widely known is that in 1968, as it prepared its first piloted Apollo flight – Apollo 7, which flew in September 1968 – and its Fiscal Year 1970 submission to the Bureau of the Budget, NASA briefly considered an alternate approach to Apollo. Had it been pursued, it might have laid the technological foundation for a permanent moon base in 1980. After perhaps three Apollo exploration missions to different landing sites, NASA would have dispatched a series of Apollo missions to a single site.

In addition to intensively exploring the selected site, the astronauts would have performed engineering and life sciences experiments, assessed the lunar environment for radio and optical astronomy, and experimented with resource exploitation. The single site revisit missions would have played the role for a permanent lunar base that Gemini played for Apollo; that is, it would have enabled NASA to acquire operational skills needed for its next step forward in space.

The single site revisit concept – sometimes called the “lunar station” concept – got its start some time before 30 April 1968, when the NASA-appointed Lunar Exploration Working Group (LEWG) presented it to the Apollo Planning Steering Group. Lee Scherer, director of the Apollo Lunar Exploration Office at NASA Headquarters, asked mission planner Rodney Johnson on 7 May to chair a 10-man Single Site Working Sub-Group of the LEWG. He directed Johnson to present a progress report at the LEWG meeting scheduled for the third week of May. The Sub-Group held a two-day meeting on 12-13 May and presented results of its brief study at the 22 May LEWG meeting. It issued a revised final report on 4 June 1968.

The Sub-Group’s report began by declaring that a 12-man “International Lunar Scientific Observatory” in 1980 could become a new “Major Agency Goal” for NASA. The single site revisit missions, it continued, would pave the way by demonstrating the value of a permanent lunar base. The Sub-Group then examined four options for carrying out its single site revisit program, which it labeled 0, A, B, and C. All would employ spacecraft and standard Saturn V launch vehicles the space agency had already ordered for Apollo. [...]

The rest of the article is about the plans, with some neat diagrams of next-stage Lunar exploration vehicles similar to the originals, but more advanced. But alas, it was not to be. We got the Space Shuttle instead, which was interesting, but in many ways a divergent distraction from real space exploration. If Apollo had kept going... well, we'll never know, because it didn't.

And won't likely start again any time soon. Not by us, anyway. The Chinese like to think they will, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting.
     

Solar Activity, Double Flare

2 major solar flares Friday -- the second twice as intense as the first

The sun shot out a pair of gigantic solar flares early Friday -- the second one even bigger than the first, a NOAA expert tells the Los Angeles Times.

An X1-class solar flare occurred at about 1 a.m. PDT, followed by an even larger one about eight hours later.

"This one was an X2, twice as intense as the X1 that just occurred," said Bill Murtagh, program coordinator with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in an interview Friday morning.

News of the latest activity came as NASA released a spectacular video and image, see above, of a solar eruption in September, what the space agency termed a "canyon of fire."

The video shows a 200,000-mile-long filament leaping from the atmosphere of the sun and creating a rippling, glowing canyon, which "traces the channel where magnetic fields held the filament aloft before the explosion," NASA says.

So what's with all the activity? Our home star is hitting solar maximum in its 11-year cycle activity, and scientists had predicted it would be meh -- a wimpier maximum than in cycles past.

[...]

The sunspot group that has been active Friday is rotating nearer the center of the sun, he noted. If the flares keep up, there could be more serious effects in store for Earth in the next three or four days.

Murtagh said that indeed this is the "lowest solar maximum since back in the 1900-1910 time frame." But that doesn't mean that X-class flares and their attendant problems will not occur. [...]

If you follow the link, it has video.

     

Can a Warp Drive really "fly"?

Some people say definitely "yes":


Why Warp Drives Aren't Just Science Fiction

[...] According to Einstein's theory of special relativity, an object with mass cannot go as fast or faster than the speed of light. However, some scientists believe that a loophole in this theory will someday allow humans to travel light-years in a matter of days.

In current FTL theories, it's not the ship that's moving — space itself moves. It's established that space is flexible; in fact, space has been steadily expanding since the Big Bang.

By distorting the space around the ship instead of accelerating the ship itself, these theoretical warp drives would never break Einstein's special relativity rules. The ship itself is never going faster than light with respect to the space immediately around it.

Davis's paper examines the two principle theories for how to achieve faster-than-light travel: warp drives and wormholes.

The difference between the two is the way in which space is manipulated. With a warp drive, space in front of the vessel is contracted while space behind it is expanded, creating a sort of wave that brings the vessel to its destination.

With a wormhole, the ship (or perhaps an exterior mechanism) would create a tunnel through spacetime, with a targeted entrance and exit. The ship would enter the wormhole at sublight speeds and reappear in a different location many light-years away.

In his paper, Davis describes a wormhole entrance as "a sphere that contained the mirror image of a whole other universe or remote region within our universe, incredibly shrunken and distorted." [...]

It goes on to describe a theoretical device called a "Ford-Svaiter mirror", and how it would work to create this "wave". Fascinating stuff.

   

Big Solar Flares this weekend?

Maybe:

Sunspot Blasting Out Major Solar Flares Will Face Earth Soon

The super-active sunspot responsible for unleashing the three most powerful solar flares of 2013 within a 24-hour stretch this week is slowly rotating toward Earth and will likely be facing our planet by the weekend, experts say.

Active Region 1748, as the sunspot is known, unleashed three monster solar flares between Sunday and Monday (May 12 to 13). Every one of the solar storms registered as an X-class flare — the most powerful type — with each successive event stronger than the last, culminating in an X3.2 megablast Monday night.

These solar explosions did not affect Earth, since AR1748 was not facing our planet at the time. But the sunspot is now circling into view, so future flares and any associated eruptions of super-hot solar plasma — called coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — could potentially target our planet, scientists say. [Sun Unleashes Biggest Flares of 2013 (Photos)]

"In a couple of days, it will be far enough onto the disk that any CMEs that we got would probably have some impact on Earth," solar astrophysicist C. Alex Young, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told SPACE.com.

AR1748 should be near the center of the solar disk by around Saturday, Young added.

"If it sends something off, then we can expect to get some CMEs sort of head-on" at that point, he said.

[...]

Scientists give AR1748 a 40 to 50 percent chance of firing off another X-class flare, he added, though this probability is a rough estimate that could change as further information becomes available.

X-class flares aimed at Earth can have consequences on a planet-wide scale, triggering widespread radio blackouts and long-lasting radiation storms.

Earth-directed CMEs have even more destructive potential. When a CME's charged particles interact with Earth's magnetic field, they can spawn geomagnetic storms powerful enough to disrupt GPS signals, radio communications and power grids.

Solar activity waxes and wanes over an 11-year cycle. The current cycle, called Solar Cycle 24, is ramping up toward an expected peak later this year. [...]

See the full article for embedded link, and video.
     

Panarama from Mars

Follow the link and click on the interactive panorama, in full screen mode. It's really cool:

Stand on Mars Next to the Curiosity Rover With This Incredible Panorama
     

Sci-Fi Rockets of the '50s become a reality

SXSW: Elon Musk discusses hovering rocket, Mars and that NYT review

AUSTIN -- Elon Musk says if mankind doesn't make it to Mars by the time he dies, it'll be the biggest disappointment of his life.

Speaking to a packed crowd of several thousand attendees at South by Southwest on Saturday, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX said he might even consider making the journey himself.

"I'd like to die on Mars, just not on impact," he said.

For now, he's been focusing his attention on something a bit closer to home. Musk revealed to the crowd that SpaceX is one step closer to developing a reusable rocket, saying the company recently launched a 10-story rocket that burst into the sky, rose 262.8 feet, hovered and landed safely on the pad 34 seconds later using thrust vector and throttle control. To cushion its fall back to the launch pad, the Grasshopper has steel landing legs with hydraulic dampers, plus a steel support structure.

Video of the test, which took place at SpaceX’s rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas, was shown to an enraptured South by Southwest crowd. Musk said it was the first time anyone aside from the video editor and himself had seen the footage, which you can check out below.

"It can land on Earth with the accuracy of a helicopter," he said. [...]

I saw the video in the article, it was pretty cool. I used to laugh at those old sci-fi movies of the '50's, showing people landing and taking off in rockets. In my time, rockets have always been disposable. The idea of landing and taking off again in the same rocket seemed unrealistic. But now it seems, it might really have been a vision of the future after all.

Once more, everything old is new again.

Hopefully we will be seeing many more wonderful things from SpaceX.
     

Song will Premiere Broadcast from Mars

NASA, will.i.am to Premiere Song Live From Mars

Black Eyed Peas co-founder William Adams, a.k.a. will.i.am, is working with NASA on an interplanetary stunt with chart-disrupting implications—the musical artist's new single "Reach for the Stars" will premiere live from the surface of Mars via the space agency's Curiosity rover.

"Reach for the Stars" will be broadcast by Curiosity at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, NASA said in a statement. Curiosity, the largest automated mobile lab NASA has sent to the Red Planet, touched down on Mars on Aug. 5 after more than eight months in space.

The premiere of the song will coincide with an event at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., mission control for the Curiosity expedition. Fans will be able to tune into the premiere of "Reach for the Stars" online via NASA TV, which will stream the broadcast live.

Will.i.am, through his i.am.angel Foundation, is also working with NASA and Discovery Education, a developer of digital educational resources, to push a new science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics initiative leveraging Curiosity and other NASA probes, the agency said.

The singer has taken a keen interest in science and technology in recent years. Named "director of creative innovation" by Intel in early 2011, will.i.am has participated in the FIRST Robotics Competition for high school students and has discussed starting a car company.

In one interview on the red carpet, (video below) he said: "The world doesn't need another musician. They need another Bill Gates." [...]

Kewl!    

Neil Armstrong, on Space Exploration

Neil Armstrong: modest man, large footprint in time and space

[...] After commanding the Apollo 11 mission, Armstrong took a desk job at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, then taught engineering at the University of Cincinnati, served on several corporate boards, and worked out of his farm in southwest Ohio. He said he regretted not spending the time he wanted to with his family.

"I am, and ever will be, a white socks, pocket protector, nerdy engineer," he said in a rare public appearance in February 2000, cited by The Associated Press. "And I take a substantial amount of pride in the accomplishments of my profession."

He also regretted that the US space program did not make more progress than it did. "I fully expected that by the end of the century we would have achieved substantially more than we did," he told "60 Minutes." The end of the cold war also marked the end of the drive for space dominance, he said. "When we lost the competition, we lost the public will to continue."

In 2010, he came out of retirement to make a case before the US Congress to restore funding and a vision for the US space program and a workforce he described as "confused and disconsolate" by the termination of the 30-year space shuttle program, layoffs of thousands of aerospace workers, and the absence of a new US space strategy.

Public policy must be guided by the recognition that we live in a technologically driven world, he told a House panel. "Our choices are to lead, try to keep up, or get out of the way" he said. "A lead once lost is very difficult to regain."

"Neil Armstrong understood that we should reach beyond the stars," said Sen. Bill Nelson (D) of Florida, a former NASA shuttle astronaut, in a statement. "His 'one giant leap for mankind' was taken by a giant of a man." [...]

Also see:

R.I.P. Neil Armstrong
     

R.I.P. Neil Armstrong

From Wikipedia: Neil Armstrong

Neil Alden Armstrong (August 5, 1930 – August 25, 2012) was an American astronaut, test pilot, aerospace engineer, university professor and United States Naval Aviator. He was the first person to walk on the Moon. Before becoming an astronaut, Armstrong was a United States Navy officer and had served in the Korean War. After the war, he served as a test pilot at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics High-Speed Flight Station, now known as the Dryden Flight Research Center, where he logged over 900 flights. He graduated from Purdue University and the University of Southern California.

A participant in the U.S. Air Force's Man In Space Soonest and X-20 Dyna-Soar human spaceflight programs, Armstrong joined the NASA Astronaut Corps in 1962. His first spaceflight was the NASA Gemini 8 mission in 1966, for which he was the command pilot, becoming one of the first U.S. civilians in space.[1] On this mission, he performed the first manned docking of two spacecraft with pilot David Scott.

Armstrong's second and last spaceflight was as mission commander of the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969. On this mission, Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended to the lunar surface and spent 2½ hours exploring, while Michael Collins remained in orbit in the Command Module. Armstrong was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Richard Nixon along with Collins and Aldrin, the Congressional Space Medal of Honor by President Jimmy Carter in 1978, and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2009.

On August 25, 2012, Armstrong died in Cincinnati, Ohio[2], at the age of 82 due to complications from blocked coronary arteries. [...]

Read the whole thing for details about his interesting life and achievements.



Also see:

Neil Armstrong remembered as a 'reluctant American hero'

Neil Armstrong: modest man, large footprint in time and space

     

South Africa's Space Cube, "ZACUBE-1"

South Africa to Launch Mini Satellite for Space Weather Resesarch

A mini satellite weighing 1.2 kilograms will be launched from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) in November to collect information about space weather, it was learned on Wednesday.

Funded by the Department of Science and Technology, the satellite -- ZACUBE-1- will be South Africa's first nano- satellite running on the same amount of power used by a 5-watt light bulb, according to researchers at the CPUT.

Comparing ZACUBE-1 to Sputnik, the first satellite in the world to be launched into space in 1957, lead researcher Robert van Zyl described the nano-satellite as an evolutionary leap in space technology.

He said ZACUBE-1 cost much less and was 84 times smaller than Sputnik, tiny enough to be put on the palm of a human hand.

The satellite will travel to Russia and ultimately to space where the satellite will be released from its pod and its 10- meterantennae will be deployed to send information to receiving stations at CPUT and the town of Hermanus near Cape Town, according to the local newspaper Cape Times.

The satellite, also known as CubeSat, will be operational for between two and five years. Researchers expect the satellite to fall to the earth and burn up in about 10 to 20 years.

ZACUBE-1 is the result of 18 months of research and development by students and staff from the French South African Institute of Technology at CPUT, according to the report.

Doesn't say much though, about what kind of information about Space Weather it will be gathering.
     

How SpaceX is Saving America Money

By being more efficient than NASA:


Why SpaceX is setting the pace in the commercial space race

[...] Dec. 7, 2012, will mark the 40th anniversary of the flight of Apollo 17. That was the last time the United States ever launched an astronaut beyond Earth orbit. The reason why the operational era of human exploration beyond Earth orbit lasted a mere three and a half years, from July 1969 to December 1972, is that early in the Space Age, and continuing with the space shuttle, the nation tied itself to an infrastructure and a way of doing business that was too expensive to sustain.

NASA acknowledged this reality in 2006, even as it was pursuing its plan to send astronauts back to the moon — known as Project Constellation or “Apollo on Steroids” — by establishing the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program. The purpose of the COTS program was to see if there was a better, more sustainable model for achieving access to space by forgoing the traditional approach of top-down, sole-source , cost-plus contracting — and instead harnessing the innovation and drive of private industry while still maintaining a close partnership with NASA.

After plowing nearly $8 billion into the Ares 1 booster program, Project Constellation did in fact prove too expensive to sustain. Instead, it was the COTS approach for cargo delivery to the space station that became the basis for NASA’s commercial crew program.

Success for SpaceX
SpaceX’s first demonstration cargo flight to the space station was accomplished in May as part of the COTS program. That flight took longer than expected, but the results were well worth NASA’s time and money. Thanks to its investment of $396 million, plus a great deal of advice, NASA has made it possible for SpaceX to produce not just a new launch vehicle but something much more profound: a new space transportation system consisting of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle, the recoverable and reusable Dragon spacecraft, and the infrastructure to support those spacecraft.

For comparison’s sake, the cost to NASA for doing this was less than what the space agency spent on one suborbital test launch of the Ares 1-X booster in 2009. It was less than NASA has spent on the development of its deep-space Orion crew capsule in the first half of this year alone.

Now SpaceX has a contract to launch 12 cargo flights to the space station at a cost to the American taxpayer of about $133 million per flight — putting America back in the orbital transport business. The SpaceX Falcon-Dragon transportation system arguably represents the best investment NASA has ever made. In light of that success, a failure to include the company in the top two for NASA’s commercial crew program would signal an almost unfathomable retreat, unworthy of the best of American ingenuity.

The stunningly low-cost and expansive nature of the Falcon-Dragon system represents much more than a rare bargain for taxpayers, in an era when most such stories have a very different ending. It offers indisputable proof that a new approach to space transportation can work far more effectively than the old ways. It’s absolutely vital to keep the company and the space transport system which has pioneered this path in the vanguard. [...]

I did a post about SpaceX last year. It's a truly amazing company.

NASA was necessary to get manned space exploration started. It's done that. But now it's role is changing; it gets to hold the door open for others to follow.
     

New Euro Weather Satellite Sends 1st Image

MSG-3 Spins Out The Weather Report ...First Images
[SatNews] It scans Earth’s surface and atmosphere every 15 minutes in 12 different wavelengths, to track cloud development.

Today, the Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI) instrument on MSG-3 captured its first image of the Earth. This demonstrates that Europe’s latest geostationary weather satellite, launched on 5 July, is performing well and is on its way to taking over operational service after six months of commissioning.

The European Space Agency (ESA) was responsible for the initial operations after launch (the so-called launch and early orbit phase) of MSG-3 and handed over the satellite to EUMETSAT on 16 July.

The first image is a joint achievement by ESA, EUMETSAT, and the European space industry. For its mandatory programmes, EUMETSAT relies on ESA for the development of new satellites and the procurement of recurrent satellites like MSG-3. This cooperation model has made Europe a world leader in satellite meteorology by making best use of the respective expertise of the two agencies.

[...]

MSG-3 is the third in a series of four satellites introduced in 2002. These spin-stabilized satellites carry the primary Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager, or SEVIRI. The prime contractor for the MSG satellites is Thales Alenia Space, with the SEVIRI instrument built by Astrium.

SEVIRI delivers enhanced weather coverage over Europe and Africa in order to improve very short range forecasts, in particular for rapidly developing thunder storms or fog. It scans Earth’s surface and atmosphere every 15 minutes in 12 different wavelengths, to track cloud development.

SEVIRI can pick out features as small as a kilometer across in the visible bands, and three kilometres in the infrared. In addition to its weather-watching mission and collection of climate records, MSG-3 has two secondary payloads.

The Geostationary Earth Radiation Budget sensor measures both the amount of solar energy that is reflected back into space and the infrared energy radiated by the Earth system, to better understand climate processes. In addition, a Search & Rescue transponder will turn the satellite into a relay for distress signals from emergency beacons. [...]

New technology, and more data that should help improve weather prediction.
     

The 2012 Perseids Peak Tomorrow

Don't miss the Perseids on the starry night of August 12th

How can I best view the Perseids meteor shower?

The Perseids have been observed by humans for about 2000 years, with the earliest knowledge of their existence emerging from the Far East. It is one of the finest meteor showers to observe, producing up to 60-100 bright, fast, and colorful meteors per hour during their peak. This annual meteor shower is active from July 23 through August 22, and usually peaks on August 11 and 12.

Perseids is extremely consistent in its timing and can potentially be observable for several weeks in the summer sky, conditional on your whereabouts, lighting conditions, and weather. Meteor showers are commonly named after their radiant point, the perspective point in the sky from which the meteors appear to come from. In the case of Perseids, it is named after the constellation Perseus, which is positioned in approximately the same point in which the Perseids meteor shower appears to originate from.

While this summer spectacular appears to radiate from a constellation, they are actually caused by the Earth passing through the dust particles of the comet Swift-Tuttle. Each summer, Earth passes into a trail of dust left by this comet, and as a result, all the dust and debris burning up in our atmosphere, travelling at a very fast 132,000 miles per second (59 km/s), produces the spectacle known as the Perseids meteor shower, or what are popularly recognized as “shooting stars”. There's no danger to sky watchers, though. The fragile grains disintegrate long before they reach the ground.

While the meteors are certainly bright, they are typically not much larger than a grain of sand. However, as they travel at immense speeds, these tiny particles put on an impressive show. Due to the way the comet’s orbit is tilted, dust from the Swift-Tuttle falls on Earth’s northern hemisphere. Unfortunately, this leads to extremely low visibility for those in Australia, New Zealand, and portions of South America.

In 2012, the waning crescent moon occurring on August 12 will not have a negative impact on the visibility of the Perseids. Due to the lack of bright moonlight, the fainter meteors will not be concealed from view. It is advisable to observe the meteor shower during the predawn hours on the mornings of August 11, 12, and 13. With up to 60-100 meteors per hour predicted, observers may catch plenty of bright meteors streaking along in the light of the moon.

How do I know the sky is dark enough to see meteors?

If you happen to live near a brightly lit city, if possible, we recommend that you drive away from the glow of city light. After you’ve escaped the glow of the city, find a dark, safe, and possibly isolated spot where oncoming vehicle headlights will not occasionally ruin your sensitive night vision. Look for state or city parks or other safe dark-sites.

Once you have settled down at your observation spot, look approximately half way up the sky facing northeast. This way you can have the Perseids’ radiant within your field of view. Looking directly up at the sky or into the radiant is not recommended since this is just the point in which they appear to come from. You are more likely to see a trail when looking slightly away from this point. Looking half-way up into the sky will lead to the best show in the house!

     

Obama, Romney, and an Alien Invasion...

Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. But it's part of a survey:

Most Americans Believe Government Keeps UFO Secrets, Survey Finds

[...] The survey, conducted ahead of National Geographic's new series Chasing UFOs, asked 1,100 Americans 18 and older for their extraterrestrial opinions.

As it turns out, the idea of aliens and UFOs isn't that farfetched to most Americans.

Here are some of the survey's most surprising findings:

-More than three quarters (77 percent) of those surveyed believe there are signs that aliens have visited Earth, and over half (55 percent) think Men in Black-style agents threaten those who report seeing them.

-More than a third (36 percent) believe aliens have already visited.

-Eighty percent believe the government has hidden information on UFOs from the public.

-Nearly two thirds (65 percent) think President Obama would be a better leader than Mitt Romney if an alien invasion were to happen. [...]

Obama a better leader during an alien invasion? I wonder why? Perhaps this explains it: