![]() ![]() We’re seeing that very often, one flare will trigger another flare all the way on the other side of the sun. “For the first time, we have the full sun, all the time, every second,” Chamberlin says. SDO gives NASA’s scientists massive amounts of new information about the sun. “We get pretty much an image every second,” Chamberlin says, adding that the picture quality “is 10 times better than high-definition television.” “So it’s not only to understand the sun, but it’s living with a star and understanding how the sun influences us on Earth.” Instead of having a hard drive to store images and video of the sun, SDO is constantly streaming data- equivalent to half a million songs from iTunes every day-to a ground station in Las Cruces, New Mexico. “It is part of NASA’s ‘Living with a Star’ program,” he says. “In the worst case scenario, astronauts could have gotten seriously injured on these trips if one of those major events had happened.” Living with a Star Chamberlin says learning more about space weather is one of the observatory’s primary missions. “Historically, we have been very lucky, because we didn’t know these effects during the Apollo era,” Hesse says. Space weather could have been a grave danger for astronauts who went into space as part of NASA’s Apollo missions between 19. In 1989, space weather caused 6 million people in Quebec, Canada, to lose electrical power for more than nine hours. Hesse says that in extreme cases, space weather can lead to a disruption in the power grid. Some space weather events have created radio blackouts for several days in polar areas. On aircrafts flying above Earth’s polar regions, crew members rely on high-frequency radio for communication. That’s something a lot of people are becoming very dependent upon.” ![]() “It could affect our GPS and how accurate it is. “It mostly influences technology,” he says. According to Phil Chamberlin, a NASA research astrophysicist and one of the deputy project scientists for SDO, space weather can be quite a nuisance here on Earth. “Space weather, in a nutshell, is the conditions in the space environment that we are interested in because they have impacts on the health and safety of equipment and humans in space and on the ground,” says Michael Hesse, chief of the Space Weather Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. These features can wreak havoc on technology on Earth in a phenomenon known as space weather. Solar wind is the constant ejection of electrically charged particles from the sun. A coronal mass ejection (CME) is a sudden release of gas bubbles and magnetic fields from the sun’s atmosphere. A solar flare is a blast of radiation associated with sunspots. Solar prominences often appear as loops-some so large that several Earth-sized planets could fit inside. A solar prominence is an enormous eruption of plasma from the sun’s surface. SDO is documenting solar events such as solar prominences, solar flares, coronal mass ejections and high-speed solar wind. Since being launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on February 11, 2010, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has captured stunning images and video of the sun in action. ![]()
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