Speaking of solar activity, a giant coronal hole opened up in the Sun’s northern hemisphere earlier this week, triggering auroras at high latitudes. Image made by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), via APOD. Click image to enlarge.

Just wait for all the Chicken Little types to try and blame this obviously solar-related phenomenon on Anthropogenic CO² production. From NASA Science:

A Puzzling Collapse of Earth’s Upper Atmosphere

July 15, 2010: NASA-funded researchers are monitoring a big event in our planet’s atmosphere. High above Earth’s surface where the atmosphere meets space, a rarefied layer of gas called “the thermosphere” recently collapsed and now is rebounding again.

“This is the biggest contraction of the thermosphere in at least 43 years,” says John Emmert of the Naval Research Lab, lead author of a paper announcing the finding in the June 19th issue of the Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). “It’s a Space Age record.”

Image: Atmospheric Density over time.

The collapse happened during the deep solar minimum of 2008-2009—a fact which comes as little surprise to researchers. The thermosphere always cools and contracts when solar activity is low. In this case, however, the magnitude of the collapse was two to three times greater than low solar activity could explain.

“Something is going on that we do not understand,” says Emmert.

Gee . . . Ya think?

These images are just astounding . . .

April 21, 2010: Warning, the images you are about to see could take your breath away.

At a press conference today in Washington DC, researchers unveiled “First Light” images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, a space telescope designed to study the sun.

“SDO is working beautifully,” reports project scientist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “This is even better than we could have dreamed.”

Launched on February 11th from Cape Canaveral, the observatory has spent the past two months moving into a geosynchronous orbit and activating its instruments. As soon as SDO’s telescope doors opened, the spacecraft began beaming back scenes so beautiful and puzzlingly complex that even seasoned observers were stunned.

Be sure to click on the image above to view full-size and then go to the SDO Website.

The Apollo-13 astronauts safely returned to Earth on April 17, 1970. Today commemorates the 41st anniversary of the dramatic conclusion to what must have been the most tedious and frightening events in space exploration history.

NASA launched Apollo-13 to be the third manned landing on the Moon. Two days into the mission, an oxygen tank on board the command module exploded, causing the end of the planned mission and initiated a dramatic space rescue effort, both back on Earth and on board the spacecraft.

The flight was commanded by James A. Lovell, with John L. “Jack” Swigert command module pilot, and Fred W. Haise lunar module pilot. The three astronauts and the Apollo-13 ground crew pieced together a rescue plan. Despite limited power, loss of cabin heat, shortage of potable water, and the critical need to jury-rig the carbon dioxide removal system, the crew returned safely to Earth on April 17, and the mission was termed a “successful failure”.

During the early 1990’s (I don’t remember the exact date), the Management Club at the company where I worked, invited Fred Haise to speak at one of our dinner meetings. He brought along a slide show and much anecdotal history of the Apollo-13 events. Haise recounted his time as an adviser to Bill Paxton, who played the role of Haise in the Apollo-13 film. Needless to say, the movie strayed from the business-like conduct of the astronauts in favor of dramatics, but the story line went more-or-less like the actual events, according to Haise.

After the presentation, I stepped to the podium (along with most everyone else there) and shook the hand of a real space hero.

Before I retired, I had the opportunity to work on a lot of very interesting and exotic aerospace projects. I worked on projects involving everything from Intercontinental Ballistic Missile systems to Airborne Multimode Radar systems to Geosynchronous Communications Satellite systems. I developed electronics for Electro-optical systems such as Forward Looking Infrared imaging, Laser Rangefinders, Target Designators and Guidance. I developed software for Automated Test Equipment, Cockpit Simulators, Global Communications Satellites and more. Hell - I even was co-inventor on the Barbie Piano project when I briefly worked at Mattel Toys.

Fewer things make me more proud than when a project I worked on gets some press for making a milestone. Although I had more to do with the avionics equipment for the Joint Strike Fighter than the flight systems, it still gives me pride to see the first flight milestone. This is a magnificent aircraft with a host of exotic systems and capabilities. I could tell you about them, but then - well - you know . . .

Cubical rocks lie in a spot designated “Chocolate Hills” by the JPL team. These remind me of stones quarried to build ancient structures on our planet.

Excerpt from the Mars Rover website:

Opportunity at a sweet spot on Mars

This rock has a thick, dark-colored coating that is interesting to scientists because many of the rocks in the surrounding area have the same mysterious dark stuff. The coating could be remnants of a layer that was changed by the action of water and weather or, it could be a layer of rock that melted when a meteor (less than a foot across) impacted Mars, ejecting this rock and others and creating the crater “Concepcion”. Knowing its origins will help them understand the history of Mars. Opportunity’s mission is to figure out the “ingredients” of this morsel by studying the chemicals in it.

The article is silent about the shape of the rocks.

It looks like the solar activity is starting to increase. This is the first day in a while where there are three sunspots visible on the Earth-facing side of the sun. These images are from the SOHO spacecraft. The left panel is the visible light snapshot and the right panel is energy being emitted in a narrow band of ultraviolet. You can’t see UV, but it’s common knowledge that it is a major cause of skin damage.

Just how solar activity affects the climate isn’t well understood, but there is correlation between sunspot numbers and the climate.

I don’t know about you, but I am sure there are a lot of Americans rooting for warmer weather tonight. That includes us, even though we’re California weather wimps according to Breda.

EXPLOSION ON THE SUN

Coronagraphs onboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) observed a bright double-ringed coronal mass ejection (CME) billowing over the sun’s western limb during the late hours of Feb. 1st. At present, the source of the blast is unknown.

The bright spot to the left of the sun is Venus. Click on the image for a slightly larger view.

Via SpaceWeather.com

I have programmed several favorite websites (other than the blogs) that I like to visit daily. One of those is the NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) website.

A favorite feature of mine, is the Very Latest SOHO Images page. On this page, I can see the solar disc in four different Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) wavelengths of light, two images (Continuum and Magnetogram) from the Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI), and two fields of view from the Large Angle and Spectrometric COronagraph (LASCO).

The Latest Images page is where I can see what’s happening on and around the Sun in near real time. Today’s EIT images tell me that there are active regions on both the left and right sides of the disc. The active region on the right will be rotating out of view soon, while the one on the left will move toward the center of the disc. The MDI images reveal no large sunspots - the remnants of sunspot 1035 are just coming into view in the upper left. The LASCOs reveal a couple of interesting things - there are Coronal Mass Ejections associated with both active regions seen in the EIT images and the planet Mercury passed in front of and below the Sun a few days ago.

Being a long-time astronomy enthusiast, I am very glad that the Hubble Space Telescope is busily producing magnificent images such as this one of Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 6217, seen on today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day:

From the HST website:

For the past three months, scientists and engineers at the Space Telescope Science Institute and Goddard have been focusing, testing, and calibrating the instruments. Hubble is one of the most complex space telescopes ever launched, and the Hubble servicing mission astronauts performed major surgery on the 19-year-old observatory’s multiple systems. This orbital verification phase was interrupted briefly July 19 to observe Jupiter in the aftermath of a collision with a suspected comet.

Hubble now enters a phase of full science observations. The demand for observing time will be intense. Observations will range from studying the population of Kuiper Belt objects at the fringe of our solar system to surveying the birth of planets around other stars and probing the composition and structure of extrasolar planet atmospheres. There are ambitious plans to take the deepest-ever near-infrared portrait of the universe to reveal never-before-seen infant galaxies that existed when the universe was less than 500 million years old. Other planned observations will attempt to shed light on the behavior of dark energy, a repulsive force that is pushing the universe apart at an ever-faster rate.

Click on the image above to enlarge.

There are signs that the current solar cycle, presently in a relatively low activity state, is on the move to become more active as we enter the second year of the eleven-year cycle. This is a movie of an event captured last February that scientists are calling a “solar tsunami.” It is a towering wave of plasma that lifts itself more than the width of the Earth above the solar surface and hurls massive amounts of solar matter into space.

From NASA:

The twin STEREO spacecraft confirmed their reality in February 2009 when sunspot 11012 unexpectedly erupted. The blast hurled a billion-ton cloud of gas (a “CME”) into space and sent a tsunami racing along the sun’s surface. STEREO recorded the wave from two positions separated by 90o, giving researchers an unprecedented view of the event:

Above: A solar tsunami seen by the STEREO spacecraft from orthogonal points of view. The gray part of the animation has been contrast-enhanced by subtracting successive pairs of images, resulting in a “difference movie.”

Please note that this is actual science and not the filtered version that you get from, say, the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit. You can click on the movie above to see a larger version.

Over at the STEREO Solar observation website, they now feature an animated image of most of the solar globe. From the vantage points of the STEREO Ahead and Behind spacecraft, images are processed into this movie of the globe. Note the hot regions near the right edge just before the blank region - those spots are not in view of the SOHO spacecraft which sees the sun from the same angle as the Earth from its station at L1, the first Lagrangian point between the Earth and Sun.

From the STEREO website:

STEREO consists of two space-based observatories - one ahead of Earth in its orbit, the other trailing behind. With this new pair of viewpoints, scientists will be able to see the structure and evolution of solar storms as they blast from the Sun and move out through space.

This movie shows a spherical map of the Sun as it currently appears, formed from a combination of the latest STEREO Ahead and Behind beacon images. The movie starts with the view of the Sun as seen from Earth, with the 0 degree meridian line in the middle. The map then rotates through 360 degrees to show the part of the Sun not visible from Earth. The black wedge shows the part of the Sun not yet visible to the STEREO spacecraft.