Satellite image of a cloud vortex off the coast of Greenland (NASA/MODIS/Chelys)
Looking south across the southern tip of Greenland, this satellite image shows an enormous cloud vortex spiraling over the northern Atlantic ocean on January 26, 2013. An example of the powerful convection currents in the upper latitudes, these polar low cyclones are created when the motion of cold air is energized by the warmer ocean water beneath.
Sometimes referred to as Arctic cyclones, these spiraling storms can bring gale-force winds and heavy snowfall over a wide area of ocean during their 12- to 36-hour lifespans. Hurricane-type storms don’t only form in the tropics!
This image was captured by the MODIS instrument on NASA’s Aqua satellite from its polar orbit 705 km (438 miles) above the Earth. The view has been rotated so south is up; the southernmost tip of Greenland can be seen at lower right. Click for an impressive high-resolution view.
View of the Andes from the ISS on Feb. 4, 2013 (NASA)
Even though he’s a busy guy, Expedition 34 astronaut Chris Hadfield still takes the time to share some of his amazing views from orbit aboard the ISS. One of his most recent photos is this stunning view of Andean ridges rising up from a blue haze of Pacific fog, the arc of Earth’s horizon in the distance. Gorgeous! (Edit: according to a labeled image by Peter Caltner, this is looking southeast into northern Argentina – no Pacific in view. So the haze is coming from the valley, not the ocean.)
Shared on Twitter at 6:25 p.m. EST, this has quickly become one of Hadfield’s more popular images — and for good reason. In fact sometimes it’s hard to keep up with this high-flying Canadian, who easily posts half a dozen or more photos from all across the world every day on Twitter, Facebook, and his Google+ profile (which is managed by his son Evan.) But since the ISS goes around the globe 16 times a day, there’s certainly no shortage of sights for Chris and the Exp. 34 crew!
Check out a few more of Chris Hadfield’s recent photos below:
The Mississippi delta deposits “the soil of America’s heartland” into the Gulf of Mexico (NASA)
“It’s a bird, it’s a plane… it’s a river in South America!” tweeted Hadfield. (Actually it’s looking west along the Rio São Francisco river in Brazil.) NASA
Chesapeake Bay from orbit. “You can even see the causeway,” Hadfield noted. (NASA)
On Feb. 2, Hadfield took this photo of storm clouds over Africa. “My breath was taken away,” he wrote. (NASA)
Toronto on the shore of Lake Ontario, “Canada’s most populous city” (NASA)
Want to see more of Chris Hadfield’s images from orbit? Follow him on Twitter and Facebook and over on Google+. (Just don’t be surprised if you find yourself changing your desktop background a lot more often!)
And for even more space adventures, tune in to the CSA website on February 7 at 10:30 a.m. EST when Col. Hadfield will have a live chat with William Shatner, building upon their brief (but immensely popular) impromptu web conversation from last month. He’ll also be taking questions from “space tweeps” on-site at CSA.
Asteroid 2012-DA14 will pass Earth closely on Feb. 15, 2013 (NASA)
On February 15 a chunk of rock about 50 meters wide will whiz by Earth at nearly 8 km/s, coming within 27,680 km of our planet’s surface — closer than many weather and communications satellites.
For those of you more comfortable with imperial units, that’s 165 feet wide traveling 17,800 mph coming within 17,200 miles. But regardless whether you prefer meters or miles, in astronomy that’s what’s called a close call.
Scientists stress that there’s no danger of an impact by this incoming asteroid, designated 2012-DA14, but it’s yet another reminder that in our neck of the Solar System we are definitely not alone.
“2012-DA14 will definitely not hit Earth,” says JPL’s near-Earth object specialist Don Yeomans. “The orbit of the asteroid is known well enough to rule out an impact.”
But with 2012-DA14’s upcoming February flyby Yeomans notes, “this is a record-setting close approach.”
The rocky asteroid will come within about 4 Earth radii, which is well within the orbits of geosynchronous satellites. During its closest approach at 19:26 UTC it should be visible in the sky to amateur telescopes (but not the naked eye), becoming as bright as an 7th- or 8th-magnitude star.
Radar observatories will be watching 2012-DA14 during the days leading up to and following its approach in an attempt to better determine its size, shape and trajectory. NASA’s Goldstone facility will have an eye — er, dish — on DA14, but it won’t be visible to Arecibo. Stay tuned for more info!
Read more about 2012-DA14 on the JPL Near-Earth Object Program page here.
This map represents global temperature anomalies averaged from 2008 through 2012. Credit: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies/NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio.
This week, scientists at NASA released their global climate analysis for 2012 which revealed that Earth continues to experience warmer temperatures than several decades ago. The past year was the ninth warmest year on record since 1880, continuing what appears to be a long-term global trend of rising temperatures. The ten warmest years in the 132-year record have all occurred since 1998, and the last year that was cooler than average was 1976. The hottest years on record were 2010 and 2005.
The analysis was done by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) which monitors global surface temperatures on an ongoing basis, comparing temperatures around the globe to the average global temperature from the mid-20th century.
In 2012, the average temperature was about 14.6 degrees Celsius (58.3 degrees Fahrenheit). This is .55 degrees C (1.0 degree F) warmer than the mid-20th century baseline, with the global average temperature having risen about 0.8 degrees C (1.4 degrees F) since 1880. The majority of that change has occurred in the past forty years.
Additionally, last week the US National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) released their latest climate report from 2012 and found that it was the warmest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States. The average temperature for the contiguous United States for 2012 was 13 degrees C (55.3 degrees F) which was 3.2°F above the 20th century average.
The map depicts temperature anomalies, or changes, by region in 2012; while the line plot above shows yearly temperature anomalies from 1880 to 2011 as recorded by NASA GISS, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center, the Japanese Meteorological Agency, and the Met Office Hadley Centre in the United Kingdom. NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
The data was gathered by NASA GISS, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center, the Japanese Meteorological Agency, and the Met Office Hadley Centre in the United Kingdom. All four institutions tally temperature data from stations around the world and make independent judgments about whether the year was warm or cool compared to other years. Though there are minor variations from year to year, all four records show peaks and valleys in sync with each other. All show rapid warming in the past few decades, and all show the last decade as the warmest.
Scientists emphasize that weather patterns cause fluctuations in average temperatures from year to year, but the continued increase in greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere assures that there will be a long-term rise in global temperatures. Each individual year will not necessarily be warmer than the previous year, but scientists expect each decade to be warmer than the previous decade.
“One more year of numbers isn’t in itself significant,” GISS climatologist Gavin Schmidt said. “What matters is this decade is warmer than the last decade, and that decade was warmer than the decade before. The planet is warming. The reason it’s warming is because we are pumping increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”
See an interactive global temperature map from New Scientist.
Carbon dioxide traps heat and largely controls Earth’s climate. It occurs naturally but is also released by the burning of fossil fuels for energy. The level of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere has been rising consistently for decades, largely driven by increasing man-made emissions. The carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere was about 285 parts per million in 1880, the first year of the GISS temperature record. By 1960, the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, measured at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory, was about 315 parts per million. Today, that measurement exceeds 390 parts per million.
The continental U.S. endured its warmest year on record by far, according to NOAA, the official keeper of U.S. weather records. NOAA also announced that global temperatures were 10th warmest on record by their analysis methods.
“The U.S. temperatures in the summer of 2012 are an example of a new trend of outlying seasonal extremes that are warmer than the hottest seasonal temperatures of the mid-20th century,” NASA GISS director James E. Hansen said. “The climate dice are now loaded. Some seasons still will be cooler than the long-term average, but the perceptive person should notice that the frequency of unusually warm extremes is increasing. It is the extremes that have the most impact on people and other life on the planet.”
When the Moon was receiving its highest number of impacts, so was Earth. Credit: Dan Durda
Some questions about our own planet are best answered by looking someplace else entirely… in the case of impact craters and when, how and how often they were formed, that someplace can be found shining down on us nearly every night: our own companion in space, the Moon.
By studying lunar impact craters both young and old scientists can piece together the physical processes that took place during the violent moments of their creation, as well as determine how often Earth — a considerably bigger target — was experiencing similar events (and likely in much larger numbers as well.)
With no substantial atmosphere, no weather and no tectonic activity, the surface of the Moon is a veritable time capsule for events taking place in our region of the Solar System. While our constantly-evolving Earth tends to hide its past, the Moon gives up its secrets much more readily… which is why present and future lunar missions are so important to science.
Take the crater Linné, for example. A young, pristine lunar crater, the 2.2-km-wide Linné was formed less than 10 million years ago… much longer than humans have walked the Earth, yes, but very recently on lunar geologic terms.
It was once thought that the circular Linné (as well as other craters) is bowl-shaped, thus setting a precedent for the morphology of craters on the Moon and on Earth. But laser-mapping observations by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (at right) determined in early 2012 that that’s not the case; Linné is actually more of a truncated inverted cone, with a flattened interior floor surrounded by sloping walls that rise up over half a kilometer to its rim.
On our planet the erosive processes of wind, water, and earth soon distort the shapes of craters like Linné, wearing them down, filling them in and eventually hiding them from plain sight completely. But in the Moon’s airless environment where the only weathering comes from more impacts they retain their shape for much longer lengths of time, looking brand-new for many millions of years. By studying young craters in greater detail scientists are now able to better figure out just what happens when large objects strike the surface of worlds — events that can and do occur quite regularly in the Solar System, and which may have even allowed life to gain a foothold on Earth.
Most of the craters visible on the Moon today — Linné excluded, of course — are thought to have formed within a narrow period of time between 3.8 and 3.9 billion years ago. This period, called the Late Heavy Bombardment, saw a high rate of impact events throughout the inner Solar System, not only on the Moon but also on Mars, Mercury, presumably Venus and Earth as well. In fact, since at 4 times its diameter the Earth is a much larger target than the Moon, it stands to reason that Earth was impacted many more times than the Moon as well. Such large amounts of impacts introduced material from the outer Solar System to the early Earth as well as melted areas of the surface, releasing compounds like water that had been locked up in the crust… and even creating the sorts of environments where life could have begun to develop and thrive.
(It’s been suggested that there was even a longer period of heavy impact rates nicknamed the “late late heavy bombardment” that lingered up until about 2.5 billion years ago. Read more here.)
In the video below lunar geologist David Kring discusses the importance of impacts on the evolution of the Moon, Earth and eventually life as we know it today:
“Impact cratering in Earth’s past has affected not only the geologic but the biologic evolution of our planet, and we were able to deduce that in part by the lessons we learned by studying the Moon… and you just have to wonder what other things we can learn by going back to the Moon and studying that planetary body further.”
It’s these sorts of connections that make lunar exploration so valuable. Keys to our planet’s past are literally sitting on the surface of the Moon, a mere 385,000 km away, waiting for us to just scoop them up and bring them back. While the hunt for a biological history on Mars or resource-mining an asteroid are definitely important goals in their own right, only the Moon holds such direct references to Earth. It’s like an orbiting index to the ongoing story of our planet — all we have to do is make the connections.
Learn more about lunar research at the LPI site here, and see the latest news and images from LRO here.
Lines of scorched earth and huge smoke plumes from wild fires in Australia were visible from the International Space Station on January 8, 2013. Credit: NASA/Chris Hadfield
Intense wild fires, or bush fires as they are called in Australia, are burning out of control across southeast Australia with authorities describing the condition as “catastrophic.” The huge fires were easily visible from the International Space Station on Tuesday and onboard, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has been watching from above.
See more of his images below:
Officials say more than 130 fires, many uncontained, are burning in the heavily populated New South Wales state, where dry conditions are fueling the fires as temperatures reached 45 degrees and wind gusts reached more than 100 kilometers per hour.
Huge plumes of smoke from bush fires in Australia were visible from the International Space Station. Credit: NASA/Chris Hadfield.
In Tasmania, an island south of Australia, rescue officials are still trying to locate around 100 residents who have been missing after a fire tore through a village, destroying dozens of homes. You can see images from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite that were taken on January 7, 2013 at the Earth Observatory website.
This beautiful photo, taken by ESO photo ambassador Babak Tafreshi, shows the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope array and VISTA telescope atop the peaks of the Cerro Paranal in Chile’s Atacama Desert. In the distance the Earth’s shadow extends outward toward the horizon, divided from the bluer daytime sky by the dusky pink “Belt of Venus.”
At an altitude of 2,635 meters (8,645 feet) the Paranal looks down onto a sea of clouds covering the Pacific Ocean, visible at right, whose shores lie 12 km in the distance.
Earth, as seen by the GOES15 satellite on December 12, 2012. Credit: NASA/NOAA GOES Project/Dennis Chesters
Although we don’t subscribe to hokum like numerology or think that dates on a man-made calendar could have any sort of cosmic significance, there is something about a little symmetry. The GOES-15 satellite captured this image of Earth today, which is 12/12/12 on the Gregorian calendar, and even added a bonus of taking the image at 1200 UTC.
Too bad the GOES-12 spacecraft had some thruster problems and is currently in a standby mode.
Dennis Chesters, project scientist of NASA’s GOES Project at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center said this image does something significant, however: the fourth tropical cyclone in the southern Pacific Ocean. Newborn Tropical Storm Evan was born today, Dec. 12, 2012 at 1500 UTC (10 a.m. EST) and appears as a rounded area of clouds in the bottom left corner of the image. Tropical Storm Evan is about 145 nautical miles west of Pago Pago, American Samoa.
For over 40 years, the ‘Blue Marble’ images of Earth taken from space have provided a new perspective of our planet, and the sometimes life-altering experience of such views was described in Frank White’s book “The Overview Effect,” published in 1987. When it came out, I gobbled it up, and have since read it several times.
Today, on the 40th anniversary of the final launch of the Apollo missions to the Moon, a new short film “Overview” has been released, which explores this phenomenon through interviews with five astronauts who have experienced first-hand seeing Earth from space.
“This view of the Earth from space – the whole Earth perspective – is, I think, the true symbol of this age,” says White in the film. “I believe … there’s going to be a greater and greater interest in communicating this idea because, after all, it’s key to our survival. We have to start acting as one species with one destiny. We are not going to survive if we don’t do that.”
The film is an inspiring look at how exploring space has given us look back at our own world and changed our perceptions. While some may say the Overview Effect is only a concept, an ideal outcome of space exploration that has yet to become a global phenomenon, I believe it is certainly something we should strive for.
The Blue Marble image from Apollo 17. Credit: Image courtesy NASA Johnson Space Center. See more info about it here.
The film includes:
Edgar Mitchell – Apollo 14 astronaut and founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences
Ron Garan – ISS astronaut and founder of humanitarian organization Fragile Oasis
Nicole Stott – Shuttle and ISS astronaut and member of Fragile Oasis
Jeff Hoffman – Shuttle astronaut and senior lecturer at MIT
Shane Kimbrough – Shuttle/ISS astronaut and Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army
Frank White – space theorist and author of the book ‘The Overview Effect’
David Loy- philosopher and author
David Beaver – philosopher and co-founder of The Overview Institute
It was produced by a group called Planetary Collective, specifically Guy Reid, Steve Kennedy and Christopher Ferstad.
Every now and then, someone takes Carl Sagan’s wonderful reading of his iconic “Pale Blue Dot” narrative and turns it into an animated presentation, usually combining images and video footage of space exploration and Earthly vistas to create something undeniably spellbinding (Sagan’s narratives do have a tendency to have that effect!) Artist Adam Winnik went a slightly different route, however, creating an illustrated animation to go along with Sagan’s reading for his thesis project in 2011. The result is no less poignant… check it out above.
