Category: space.com

Space observations are crucial to solving the challenges presented by Earth’s complex climate, which will play a pivotal role in humanity’s success or demise, argued an extensive report by the U.S. National Academies.

The new, 700-page report released today (Jan. 5) is titled “Thriving on Our Changing Planet: A Decadal Strategy for Earth Observation from Space.” In it, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) announced their recommendations for what federal research agencies — such as NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) — should do over the next 10 years. This was the second decadal survey for Earth science and applications from space; the first was published in 2007.

The report’s co-chairs — Waleed Abdalati, the director of Cooperative Institute of Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, and Bill Gail, chief technology officer at the Global Weather Corporation — addressed the survey’s recommendations during a press conference at the National Academies’ Keck Center in Washington, D.C. [See the Effects of Climate Change Across Earth (Video)]

“There is a perspective from space that cannot be gained any other way,” Abdalati said early in the press conference. Understanding the ways in which human activity and non-anthropogenic changes are shaping societies across the world ought to be considered like an extension of infrastructure, he added. Gauging weather systems and predicting sea-level rise, for example, are as vital to a “thriving” society as fixing highways and maintaining railroads.

“If you go back 10-12 years, we were in a different place when it came to Earth information from space” Abdalati said. “We were not using weather apps on our phones and planning our days’ activities around them. We were not using online mapping applications to get to and from where we’re going in the most efficient way. The military [also] relies heavily on information from NASA, NOAA and USGS.” Space observations are crucial for society in a myriad of ways across the commercial, public health and national safety sectors, the co-chairs said.

The report is the product of 290 suggestions of the most important issues to tackle in the near future, contributed by the scientific community. From those suggestions, the report’s compilers extracted 103 objectives and then synthesized them into 35 final goals. The report calls for prioritizing advances in, for example, forecasting air quality and weather so that predictions provide a lead time of up to two months. In addition, the report calls for knowing how biodiversity changes over time, predicting future geological hazards within a more accurate time frame and understanding more precisely how the ocean stores heat, among many other goals.

The co-chairs said that the report focuses on recommendations that are achievable within budget constraints and prioritizes the suggestions the committee believed were most important for the next decade. The report invites the scientific community at NASA, NOAA and USGS to focus first on achieving ambitious solutions to climate challenges and then following up with ways to accelerate technology to meet those ends, rather than the other way around. [Photos: NASA’s Novel NPP Weather & Climate Satellite]

The report recommends that NASA cap the budget for its current projects —both flying and soon-to-be-flying missions —at $3.6 billion, to leave room in the agency’s funding to serve the report’s 35 objectives over the next decade. Abdalati stressed, however, that it was important to fly the missions already in development. NASA should also continue studying how small particles of material, known as aerosols, can affect air quality and should learn more about the traits of vegetation on Earth’s surface, the co-chairs said.

The report additionally suggests that NASA start a competitive new Explorer program for medium-size agile instruments and missions (with a budget of $500 million or lower), in which participants would take a shot at addressing one of seven identified topics from the survey. Those topics include mapping ocean-surface winds and developing 3D models of the terrestrial ecosystem. The competition may also reveal what objectives will be more easily achieved in the next decade, Gail said.

Gail concluded his presentation by addressing the report’s title. “It really is about this tension between our ability to thrive over the next decade and longer, and the fact that as the planet is changing around us, the information we need to acquire about our planet is changing as rapidly as we try to acquire it,” he said. “So this will be a decade in which we will find growing community and public reckoning between two things: broad reliance on Earth information … and this growing challenge of obtaining that information.”

Follow Doris Elin Salazar on Twitter @salazar_elin. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

An enrichment of “heavy” nitrogen in Earth’s atmosphere has been found to represent the balance between biogeochemical and atmospheric production of nitrogen, a signal that one day could potentially be used to suggest the presence of biogeochemistry on other planets, too.

Nitrogen in the atmosphere is predominantly in the form of molecular nitrogen (N₂), made of two atoms of nitrogen-14. There also exists a small quantity of the heavier nitrogen-15 isotope (an atom of nitrogen with an extra neutron) and, on rare occasions, two nitrogen-15 atoms can bond together to form a nitrogen molecule known as ¹⁵N¹⁵N. However, ¹⁵N¹⁵N shares a nearly identical atomic mass with nitric oxide — the difference is a mere two one-thousandths of the mass of a neutron — posing a challenge to efforts to measure its atmospheric abundance.

In a new paper published in Science Advances, a team led by Laurence Yeung, who is an assistant professor of Earth Science at Rice University, describe how they used the ultrahigh-resolution Panorama Mass Spectrometer in co-author Professor Edward Young’s lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, to distinguish between ¹⁵N¹⁵N and nitric oxide, resulting in an accurate measurement of the abundance of ¹⁵N¹⁵N in the atmosphere. Their findings surprised them: atmospheric ¹⁵N¹⁵N was enriched by a factor of 20 times greater than can be accounted for by biological processes on the surface. [10 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life]

To determine how the atmosphere was becoming enriched with 15N15N, the research team simulated the chemistry of the thermosphere in the laboratory.

Credit: Laurence Yeung/Rice University

Instead, the team determined that chemistry in the far reaches of the upper atmosphere near the orbit of the International Space Station, driven by incoming solar extreme-ultraviolet light, cosmic rays and particle collisions, produced the extra ¹⁵N¹⁵N.

The findings reveal a battle between nitrogen chemistry on the ground and nitrogen chemistry in the upper atmosphere, with surface biogeochemistry acting to counteract the production of ¹⁵N¹⁵N in the atmosphere. The relative abundances of N₂ and ¹⁵N¹⁵N in the atmosphere are therefore a product of this “tug-of-war.”

Yeung is cautious about using the ¹⁵N¹⁵N signal as a potential biosignature in the atmospheres of exoplanets, since the signal is likely to vary depending on the distance from and the type of star the planet orbits (which affects the amount of ultraviolet light). It is also possible that non-biological nitrogen-producing chemistry could generate a signal on other planets. 

“That said,” he tells Astrobiology Magazine, “non-biological reactions of N₂ occurring far from the upper atmosphere are typically inefficient – orders of magnitude slower than those catalyzed by biological systems. [So] finding a planetary tug-of-war on the ‘biological-like’ side would be quite encouraging.”

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation divisions of Earth Sciences and Oceans Sciences.

It is sometimes difficult to rouse oneself out of a warm bed in the predawn hours to get a view of some celestial event, and that’s especially true now with such bitter-cold temperatures enveloping much of the country. But it will be worth braving the frigid outdoors early on Sunday (Jan. 7) morning to get a view of two planets that will be engaged in a very close conjunction.

Mars and Jupiter are like two ships passing in the January night  — or more precisely on the edge of the January dawn. At the break of dawn, you will find them more than one-quarter of the way up from the southeast horizon to the point directly overhead (the zenith), separated by less than two-tenths of a degree. Jupiter is enormously brighter than Mars — 191 times brighter to be exact — with Jupiter staying in view long after the morning twilight has brightened enough to render its little companion invisible.  

The gap between the worlds has been closing since the start of the new year. On the morning of New Year’s Day, they were within less than 3 degrees of each other. They’ll be within 2 degrees of each other from Jan. 2 through the 11th and will still be no more than 5 degrees apart by the 17th. [The Best Planets to See in the 2018 Night Sky]

An unusually tight conjunction

On Sunday morning (Jan. 7), Mars and Jupiter will be at their closest to each other, separated by less than half the apparent width of the full moon. Mars and Jupiter don’t approach this closely to each other very often. The last time was almost exactly 20 years ago, on Jan. 20, 1998, and the next opportunity will not come for more than 16 years, on Nov. 30, 2033. So, if your local weather forecast calls for clear skies Sunday morning, try to get up and check out this unusual planet rendezvous.  

And take a good long look and put this in your mental file, because things are going to change quite a bit between now and this summer. While Jupiter is the dominant planet in the sky now, keep in mind that with each passing day, Mars is getting closer to Earth. On Sunday, it will be 176.5 million miles (284 million kilometers) from Earth, but by the end of July, it will be five times closer and will temporarily supplant Jupiter as the second brightest planet. In fact, in July, Mars will be nearly twice as bright as Jupiter — a far cry from its current “little companion” status!

The moon pays a visit

And another member of the solar system will pay these two worlds a visit four days later, on Thursday morning, Jan. 11. A lovely waning crescent moon will form an isosceles triangle with Mars and Jupiter. 

The trio will clear the east-southeast horizon soon after 3 a.m. local time and will be well-placed for viewing a couple of hours later. The two planets will form the base of the triangle with the moon at the vertex point. 

If you envision this configuration as an arrowhead, the arrow will be oriented to point toward the upper left.  

And a few stars thrown in for good measure

If you look carefully enough, you might spy a moderately bright star to the upper right of Jupiter. Train binoculars on this object, and you’ll see not one star but two. The brighter star is Zubenelgenubi, which belongs to the zodiacal constellation of Libra, the Scales, but at one time, it was part of the constellation of Scorpius, the Scorpion. Its very name is Arabic for “the Southern Claw,” and at one time, Zubenelgenubi marked the tip of the southern claw of the scorpion. Both Zubenelgenubi and its fainter companion are traveling together through space at a distance of 76 light-years from us. 

Finally, on the morning of Jan. 14, use binoculars to check out Jupiter, which will be passing closely between two stars: 21 Nu (ν) Librae and 22 Librae, with 21 above Jupiter and 22 below the planet. The former star has a brightness of magnitude 5, and the latter has a brightness of magnitude 6. (Check out this Space.com guide for more information on the stellar brightness scale.) Steadily held binoculars should also show all four of Jupiter’s famous Galilean satellites, with Callisto, Io and Europa on one side of Jupiter and Ganymede all by itself on the other.   

In all, right on through the middle of the month, you’ll have a chance at viewing an ever-changing “celestial summit meeting.”  

All you have to do is set the alarm clock for around 5 a.m.  

And get up.

Editor’s note: If you capture an amazing photo of Mars and Jupiter together, and would like to share it with Space.com for a story or gallery, send images and comments to: spacephotos@space.com. 

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York’s Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, the Farmer’s Almanac and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for Verizon Fios1 News, based in Rye Brook, N.Y. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

A new NASA mission, the first to hitch a ride on a commercial communications satellite, will examine Earth’s upper atmosphere to see how the boundary between Earth and space changes over time.

Researchers discussed the new mission, which will launch Jan. 25 from Kourou, French Guiana, attached to the SES-14 communications satellite, in a live video from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center today (Jan. 4).

GOLD stands for Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk, and the mission will focus on the temperature and makeup of Earth’s highest atmospheric layers. Along with another upcoming satellite, called ICON, GOLD will examine how weather on Earth — and space weather caused by the sun — affects those uppermost layers. [Earth’s Colorful Atmospheric Layers Photographed from Space]

“For years, we’ve been studying the Earth’s upper atmosphere — thermosphere and ionosphere — and we’ve been looking at those [layers] in detail from the ground and from low-Earth orbit missions,” Richard Eastes, the principal investigator for GOLD from the University of Central Florida, said at the NASA presentation. “We wanted to be able to back off [to a higher orbit] and get the big picture, get a whole hemisphere at once. That lets us put things into context that we can’t understand when we’re just looking at one little piece.”

GOLD, which will inspect the ultraviolet radiation that the upper atmosphere releases, will also be the first to take comprehensive records of that atmospheric layer’s temperature, Eastes added. The satellite carrying GOLD will orbit 22,000 miles (35,400 kilometers) above Earth in a geostationary orbit, which means GOLD will stay fixed with respect to Earth’s surface as the satellite orbits and the world turns. For comparison, the International Space Station cruises at about 250 miles (400 km) above the surface. 

Earth’s ionosphere, a region of charged particles, stretches up to the border between Earth and space.

Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Duberstein

GOLD will pay particularly close attention to Earth’s thermosphere, which is the gas that surrounds the Earth higher than 60 miles (97 km) up, and the layer called the ionosphere, which forms as radiation from the sun strips away electrons from particles to create charged ions. And although solar flares and other interactions on the sun do have a strong impact on those layers, scientists are learning that Earth’s own weather has an impact on the layers, too.

“In the past, people thought that this region of the Earth’s upper atmosphere was affected primarily by what’s happening at the sun and what’s coming to the Earth from the sun,” Sarah Jones, GOLD mission scientist at Goddard, said during the presentation. The sun’s radiation and charged particles of solar wind hits Earth’s atmosphere, and in response, the planet’s magnetic field can cause geomagnetic storms and other space weather. “However, in about the last 10 years or so, there’s been this growing body of evidence that the upper atmosphere is also affected by what’s going on below.

“For example, tsunamis create waves in the air, and those waves move upwards, and the waves could potentially cause changes even at the very boundary between the Earth and space,” she added. “GOLD is studying in particular how to tease out the effects coming from the sun above and Earth below.”

Being able to model the region accurately is particularly important, the researchers said, because the ionosphere affects radio and GPS technology as well as spacecraft. Right now, changes can be observed only every several hours, and models of the upper atmosphere can predict only about a day of changes. GOLD will be able to monitor how the upper atmosphere changes and evolves throughout the day on an hourly basis so researchers can build better models.

The ICON (Ionospheric Connection Explorer) spacecraft, which will launch later in 2018, will add another dimension to the understanding researchers gain with GOLD: Rather than taking the far-off view, ICON will fly through the upper atmosphere in low-Earth orbit — 350 miles (560 km) — to get a much closer view of what’s going on.

“The cool thing about the combo between ICON and GOLD is the fact that we’re getting this global view that’s actually remote sensing, and then we have the in situ view, [where] we’re actually sending something through it,” Alex Young, the associate director for heliophysics science at Goddard, said during the presentation. Using the two together, researchers can pin down exactly what causes changes to the boundary between Earth and space, to better understand the impact it will have below — and above, Young said.

“Not only is it telling us about fundamental science, which is pertinent not just to what happens here in our solar system, but in fact in other solar systems, exoplanet systems — but also, all of this energy and matter interacts with our technology,” Young said. “It’s interacting with spacecraft, sometimes disrupting them, and it even creates a really nasty environment for astronauts. Understanding that is important also for space travel near the Earth and through the rest of the solar system.”

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com. 

Technology in development could capture images from an Earth-size planet in the nearby Alpha Centauri system in the 2020s, new research suggests. 

The new technique, presented Dec. 15 at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in New Orleans, could also help researchers see exoplanets in other systems with more than one star.

Although there’s only one star in Earth’s solar system, previous work found that two-thirds of so-called class G yellow dwarf stars (the group that includes our sun) are in multiple systems, or systems with two or more stars orbiting each other. Some known multiple systems are home to up to seven stars. [What Do We Know About Alpha Centauri?] Because multiple systems are common, they may be rich targets in the hunt for alien planets, according to Ruslan Belikov, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, and his colleagues. For example, the sun’s closest neighbor, the Alpha Centauri system, possesses three stars and potentially multiple planets, such as the Earth-size Proxima Centauri b.

To capture images of an exoplanet, astronomers typically employ an instrument known as a coronagraph, which blocks out its star’s glaring light, thus letting them seeany faint light reflected off or emitted from that world. When researchers want to directly image an exoplanet in a system that has more than one star, light from a star’s companion may drown out their view of the planet even after they block the first star’s light.

Learn more about Alpha Centauri in our full infographic.” data-options-closecontrol=”true” data-options-fullsize=”true”/>

Credit: Karl Tate, SPACE.com

Although scientists could conceivably use more than one coronagraph to block out the light from all the stars in a multiple system, tiny imperfections within the components of a telescope would inevitably cause light to leak through a coronagraph, Belikov said. “This light is only a small fraction of the original star’s light but can still overwhelm planets, which are much fainter still,” he told Space.com.Belikov and his colleagues have developed a way to get around that issue and image exoplanets in multiple-star systems. 

“We are developing the technology to search for Earth-like planets around other stars,” Belikov said in an email. “If, when I was a kid, somebody told me that I would be doing this as an adult, I would not have believed it — in my mind, detecting Earth-like planets is ‘Star Trek’ science that rightly belongs in the 23rd century. But we are doing it now.”

The new method the researchers have devised, known as the multi-star wavefront control, relies on deformable mirrors within telescopes that are used to bounce light from stars and planets onto sensors. These mirrors can alter the shape of their surfaces to correct for imperfections within the optical components of telescopes.

The new technique controls a deformable mirror “in a way that allows it to remove light from more than one star,” Belikov said. The mirror can superimpose multiple shapes onto itself, each of which can factor out light from a star.

“It’s a bit like when an audio speaker plays a symphony,” Belikov said. “It uses its lower-frequency range to represent the cellos and the higher-frequency range to represent the violins. In our case, the cello would correspond to one star and the violin to the other.”

A major advantage of this new system “is that it is compatible with many already-designed instruments,” Belikov said. “A deformable mirror is all that’s needed, which is almost always present with modern coronagraphs.”

Ideally, “we hope to infuse our technology into future space telescopes to enable them to target Alpha Centauri and other binaries,” Belikov said. “These range from small telescopes like ACESat or Project Blue that can be launched in the early 2020s, WFIRST in the mid-2020s, and LUVOIR or HabEx in the 2030s. There are also telescopes on the ground that can use this technology.”

Belikov cautioned that any exoplanet pictures that researchers capture in the near future will not resolve details such as continents and oceans. “Rather, an image of another Earth will be a pale blue dot,” he said. “However, there is a lot of information that we can discern from the spectrum of that dot, including signs of life.”

Follow Charles Q. Choi on Twitter @cqchoi. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

The countdown to New Horizons’ historic second flyby has now begun in earnest.

The NASA spacecraft, which famously zoomed past Pluto in July 2015, is set to cruise by a small object called 2014 MU69 less than 12 months from now — in the wee hours of Jan. 1, 2019, while many of us will be drinking Champagne and singing “Auld Lang Syne.” 

“Our flyby of MU69 on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day 2019 will be an exciting sequel to the historic exploration New Horizons performed at Pluto in 2015,” New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement. “Nothing even like MU69 has ever been explored before.” [Destination Pluto: NASA’s New Horizons Mission in Pictures]

2014 MU69 is a pristine hunk of icy material left over from the solar system’s planet-building epoch. Like Pluto, MU69 lies in the Kuiper Belt, the ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune’s orbit. But the two objects are very different: MU69 is a maximum of 20 miles (32 kilometers) wide, whereas Pluto measures 1,477 miles (2,377 km) across.

MU69’s small size and extreme distance from Earth — about 4 billion miles (6.4 billion km) — make it difficult to study. Even that rough size estimate was hard-won — the result of New Horizons team members traveling the globe to observe three separate “occultations” of background stars by MU69.

The occultation data also suggest that MU69 may actually be two separate objects, and that it might have at least one moon — but nobody knows for sure.

“That tells us this object is going to have a lot of surprises in store for New Horizons,” occultation campaign leader Marc Buie, also from SwRI, said in the same statement.

Timeline of New Horizons operations leading up to and just after the New Year’s 2019 encounter with Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69.

Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

During the Jan. 1 flyby, New Horizons will get within just 2,175 miles (3,500 km) of MU69’s mysterious surface — about three times closer than it got to Pluto in July 2015. This proximity will enable the spacecraft to resolve features on MU69 as small as a basketball court, NASA officials said.

“Combining images with the measurements we make of the composition of and environment around MU69 should teach us a great deal about objects like MU69 that built dwarf planets like Pluto,” said New Horizons project scientist Hal Weaver, of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.

New Horizons has been in hibernation since Dec. 22. The mission team will wake the probe on June 4, then perform a series of checks to make sure it’s ready for the MU69 encounter, which officially begins in mid-August with some attempts at long-range observations.

The 2014 MU69 flyby is the heart of New Horizons’ extended mission, which also features long-distance observations of about two dozen other Kuiper Belt objects and study of the gas and dust pervading this far-flung region.

“This post-Pluto mission is a complete and comprehensive exploration of the Kuiper Belt,” said APL’s Alice Bowman, New Horizons mission operations manager. “The spacecraft is collecting data out there throughout each year while the mission team works together to plan and shape the MU69 flyby.” 

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Twenty-five years after it was founded, an astronaut’s hometown museum is looking to expand – just in time to mark a half century since its namesake’s historic flight to the moon.

The Stafford Air & Space Museum, named for Gemini and Apollo astronaut Thomas Stafford, has announced its “Legacy Campaign,” a major fund-raising effort to grow its facilities by more than 18,000 square feet (1,670 sq. meters). The museum, located in Weatherford, Oklahoma, aims to have the first phase of the expansion completed in time to host a celebration for the 50th anniversary of Stafford’s Apollo 10 mission in May 2019.

“It is important to do this campaign while General Stafford can actively participate and enjoy firsthand the excitement and impact this expansion brings to the public,” stated Jeff DeFehr, chair of the Legacy Campaign for the museum. [Best Vacation Ideas for Space Lovers]

Founded in 1993 when a small display at the local airport grew to fill a two-room exhibition, the Stafford Air & Space Museum today encompasses over an acre of aviation and space installations. Among the artifacts showcased by the Smithsonian affiliate are a ten-story Titan II rocket and an extensive collection of rocket engines, including a Saturn V F-1 engine and a flown space shuttle main engine.

The new $3 million expansion — of which $1.4 million has been pledged to date — will increase the museum footprint to almost 60,000 sq. feet (5,600 sq. meters). It will provide the space for more artifacts to be put on display, including NASA’s fixed-base simulator used to train all of the shuttle crews and fragments of the original Wright Flyer that were carried to the moon on the Apollo 11 mission.

The Stafford Legacy Campaign, along with the cooperation of NASA, the Smithsonian and the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, will also make possible the world’s most extensive exhibit of artifacts from the Gemini program. Stafford made his first two spaceflights on board the fifth and seventh Gemini missions, Gemini 6A and 9A, in 1965 and 1966, respectively.

Architectural concept for the expansion (at top) of the Stafford Air & Space Museum, compared to its current facility (at bottom).

Credit: Stafford Air & Space Museum

In addition, the expansion will provide the resources for the commission of a full-size replica of “Snoopy,” the first lunar lander to be flown in orbit around the moon by Stafford and his Apollo 10 crewmate, Gene Cernan, in May 1969. The Apollo 10 mission served as a dress rehearsal for the first crewed landing on the moon just two months later.

“When humans first left the safety of the Earth to venture into the skies and the moon beyond, these were two of mankind’s greatest achievements,” said Max Ary, director of the Stafford Air & Space Museum. “We must keep that spirit of exploration alive in this country, and remind current and future generations what this nation can accomplish when it puts its collective hearts and minds to a common goal.”

“The museum stands witness to when America was at its best,” said Ary.

The Legacy Campaign will further upgrade the museum’s existing exhibits with immersive, interactive and high-tech features to help bring history and the artifacts to life. The expansion will provide more room for the museum to host events, temporary exhibits and the museum’s gift shop, as well as a facility to restore artifacts, such as the cockpit of a Boeing B-52 “Stratofortress” aircraft that is waiting repair and conservation.

The Stafford Air & Space Museum’s mission is to not only preserve Thomas Stafford’s legacy, but to also inspire and educate future generations to dare themselves to be great.

“This museum is not about me!” stressed Stafford, who is now 87. “It is dedicated to the American spirit of dreaming the impossible and making those dreams happen.”

“I grew up in a small western Oklahoma town during the Dust Bowl and Depression, and I flew to the moon,” added Stafford. “I’m living proof that nothing is impossible!”

For more information about the Legacy Campaign, see the Stafford Air & Space Museum’s website at staffordmuseum.com.

Follow collectSPACE.com on Facebook and on Twitter at @collectSPACE. Copyright 2017 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.

Jupiter’s twirling, swirling cloud tops look like a sheet of blue velvet in a new image from NASA’s Juno probe.

The image was created by citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran using raw data from the JunoCam instrument on Juno. While Jupiter’s cloud tops wouldn’t actually look blue to an observer hovering above the planet, the image processing allows our eyes to see the contours of Jupiter’s turbulent atmosphere — details that aren’t always visible in other images. 

Juno captured this snapshot on Dec. 16, 2017, when it was 8,292 miles (13,345 kilometers) — a little more than Earth’s diameter — above the tops of Jupiter’s clouds. The dark side of the planet just barely creeps into the image, in the upper-right corner.

The raw images are posted to the JunoCam website, and many citizen scientists post their processed images, which range from scientific to highly artistic. You can see a selection of featured Jupiter images from citizen scientists on the JunoCam website.  

The $1.1 billion Juno spacecraft arrived at Jupiter in July 2016. The spacecraft’s elongated orbit around Jupiter means it gets close to the planet only every 53 days. The spacecraft’s instruments were designed primarily to study Jupiter’s interior, which can help scientists learn about the planet’s formation and the history of the solar system. 

Follow Calla Cofield @callacofield. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

As a powerful bomb cyclone winter storm curls across the U.S. East Coast this morning (Jan. 4), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) GOES-East satellite is snapping stunning images of the Earth’s surface.

The NOAA satellite, which launched in 2016 (referred to as GOES-R and GOES-16 before and after launch), is intended to give forecasters their best-ever views of storms and severe weather affecting the globe. The satellite’s views have been updating online here as the storm progresses.[See the ‘Bomb Cyclone’ in These NASA and NOAA Gifs]

This full-disk view of Earth from the GOES-East satellite shows a storm swirling over a darkened United States Jan. 4, 2018 at 8:30 a.m. EST (1330 GMT).

Credit: NOAA

A bomb cyclone occurs when a weather system’s atmospheric pressure drops incredibly rapidly, causing it to quickly increase in strength and whipping up hurricane-level winds and often heavy snow over a broad area.

The satellite officially reached its GOES-East position in December, where it views the entire Western Hemisphere from a high geostationary orbit — it stays still relative to the Earth’s surface as it orbits and the world turns. The satellite’s powerful imagery will help forecasters track storms, hurricanes, wildfires and more as they move across the globe. GOES-East marks the first in a series of satellites set to provide high-definition storm imagery; a second is scheduled to launch in March.

“For weather forecasters, GOES-R [series, including GOES-East] will be similar to going from a black-and-white TV to super-high-definition TV,” Stephen Volz, assistant administrator for NOAA’s Satellite and Information Services Division, said before the satellite’s launch. “For the American public, that will mean faster, more accurate weather forecasts and warnings. That also will mean more lives saved and better environmental intelligence for state and local officials and all decision makers.”

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

The bottom of the ocean is more of a “sunken place” than it used to be.

In recent decades, melting ice sheets and glaciers driven by climate change are swelling Earth’s oceans. And along with all that water comes an unexpected consequence — the weight of the additional liquid is pressing down on the seafloor, causing it to sink.

Consequently, measurements and predictions of sea-level rise may have been incorrect since 1993, underestimating the growing volume of water in the oceans due to the receding bottom, according to a new study. [7 Ways the Earth Changes in the Blink of an Eye]

Scientists have long known that Earth’s crust, or outer layer, is elastic: Earlier research revealed how Earth’s surface warps in response to tidal movements that redistribute masses of water; and 2017’s Hurricane Harvey dumped so much water on Texas that the ground dropped 0.8 inches (2 centimeters), the Atlantic reported.

In the new investigation, researchers looked at more long-term impacts to the seafloor. They evaluated how much the shape of the ocean bottom may have changed between 1993 and 2014, taking into account the amount of water added to the ocean from liquid formerly locked up on land as ice. Previous research into seafloor stretching had omitted that extra water, the scientists wrote in the study.

To do that, they reviewed approximations of mass loss on land, as ice melted and drained into the oceans, and compared that to estimates of sea volume changes. They found that around the world for two decades, ocean basins deformed an average of 0.004 inches (0.1 millimeter) per year, with a total deformation of 0.08 inches (2 mm).

However, there were distinct regional patterns to the seafloor’s bending and stretching, and the amount of sag in certain parts of the ocean bottom could be significantly higher — as much as 0.04 inches (1 mm) per year in the Arctic Ocean, for a total of 0.8 inches (20 mm), the study authors reported.

As a result, satellite assessments of sea-level change — which don’t account for a sinking ocean bottom — could be underestimating the amount that seas are rising by 8 percent, according to the study.

The accuracy of future sea-level estimates could be notably improved if the sinking of the ocean floor were incorporated into the calculations, “either based on modeled estimates of ocean mass change, as was done in this study, or using more direct observations,” the scientists concluded.

The findings were published online Dec. 23 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Original article on Live Science.