Skip to main content

Home/ Groups/ SciByte
Rss Feed
Sort By: Most Recent | Popular Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Mars Base

Huge Solar Flare's Magnetic Storm May Disrupt Satellites, Power Grids | Space Weather |... - 0 views

www.space.com/magnetic-storm-satellites.html

scibyte37 sun

shared by Mars Base on 08 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • may potentially interfere with satellites in orbit and power grids when it reaches Earth.
  • Early predictions estimate that the CME will reach Earth
  • Typically, CMEs contain 10 billion tons of solar plasma and material
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • March 8) at 7 a.m. EST (1200 GMT), with the effects likely lasting for 24 hours
  • estimates that brightened auroras could potentially be seen as far south as the southern Great Lakes region, provided the skies are clear.
  • The massive sunspot region AR1429 has been particularly active since it emerged on March 2, 2012.CREDIT: NASA/SDO
    • Mars Base
      Mars Base on 08 Mar 12
       
      Image with comparisons of size to earth and jupiter
Mars Base

Sun Fires Off 2 Huge Solar Flares in One-Two Punch | Space Weather | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/ge-solar-flares-erupt-sun.html

scibyte37 sun

shared by Mars Base on 07 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Tuesday
  • One of the flares is the most powerful solar eruption of the year, so far.
  • Both of the huge flares ranked as X-class storms, the strongest type of solar flares the sun can have
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • followed several weaker, but still powerful, sun storms on Tuesday
  • came just days after another major solar flare on Sunday night
  • When aimed directly at Earth, X-class solar flares can endanger astronauts and satellites in orbit, interfere with satellite communications and damage power grids on Earth
  • also amplify the Earth's display of northern and southern lights, also known as auroras
  • five categories: A, B, C, M and X. The A-class flares are the weakest sun storms, while the X-class events are the most powerful solar flares
  • subsets, from 1 to 9, to pinpoint a solar flare's strength. Only X-class solar flares have subcategories that go higher than 9.
  • most powerful solar flare on record occurred in 2003 and was estimated to be an X28 on the solar flare scale
  • The sun is currently going through an active phase of its 11-year weather cycle
  • expected to reach its peak level of activity in 2013
Mars Base

Sun Releases a Powerful X5 Flare - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...n-releases-a-powerful-x5-flare

scibyte37 sun

shared by Mars Base on 07 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • AR1429 released an X-class flare on March 7 at 00:28 UT. (NASA/SDO)
Mars Base

Best Views Yet of Historic Apollo Landing Sites - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...-historic-apollo-landing-sites

scibyte37 Archeology apollo

shared by Mars Base on 08 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • LROC image of the Apollo 11 landing site, acquired Nov. 5, 2011
  • Nov. 5, 2011 from an altitude of only 15 miles (24 km). This is the highest-resolution view yet of the Apollo 11 landing site
  • Lunar Module’s descent stage, a seismic experiment monitor, a laser ranging reflector (LRRR, still used today to measure distances between Earth and the Moon) and its cover, and a camera can be discerned in the overhead image
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • as well as the darker trails of the astronauts’ bootprints, including Armstrong’s jaunt eastward to the rim of Little West crater
  • the total area Neil and Buzz explored it would easily fit within the infield of a baseball diamond!
  • Armstrong’s visit to the crater’s edge was an unplanned excursion. He used the vantage point to capture a panoramic image of the historic site:
  • Previously the LROC captured the Apollo 15 landing site, which included the tracks of the lunar rover — as well as the rover itself
  • Arizona State University featured the latest similarly high-resolution view of the Apollo 12 site
  • This location has the honor of being two landing sites in one: Apollo 12 and the Surveyor 3 spacecraft, which had landed on April 20, 1967 – two and a half years earlier!
  • the US flag planted by Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean isn’t itself visible, the shadow cast by it is.
  • Apollo 12 was the only mission to successfully visit the site of a previous spacecraft’s landing, and it also saw the placement of the first Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP), which included a seismometer and various instruments to measure the lunar environment
Mars Base

Huge Dust Devil on Mars Captured in Action - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...vil-on-mars-captured-in-action

scibyte37 mars

shared by Mars Base on 08 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • A towering dust devil, casts a serpentine shadow over the Martian surface in this image acquired by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
  • Mars orbiters, rovers and landers have all captured devils in action before
  • whirlwind on Mars lofting a twisting column of dust more than 800 meters (about a half a mile) high, with the dust plume about 30 meters or yards in diameter.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • on Feb. 16, 2012
  • Amazonis Planitia region of northern Mars
  • Evidence of many previous whirlwinds, or dust devils, are visible as streaks on the dusty surface shown in the image
  • like on Earth, winds on Mars are powered by solar heating
  • Mars is now farthest from the Sun,
  • though the exposure to the Sun’s rays is now less, even so, the dust devils are moving dust around on Mars’ surface
  • Dust devils occur on Earth as well as on Mars
  • spinning columns of air, made visible by the dust they pull off the ground
  • Unlike a tornado, a dust devil typically forms on a clear day
  • ground is heated by the sun, warming the air just above the ground
  • eated air near the surface rises quickly through a small pocket of cooler air above i
  • the air may begin to rotate, if conditions are just right.
Mars Base

Tevatron experiments report latest results in search for Higgs boson - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...atest-results-higgs-boson.html

scibyte37 HiggsBoson

shared by Mars Base on 07 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • New measurements
  • indicate that the elusive Higgs boson may nearly be cornered.
  • two independent experiments see hints of a Higgs boson.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • collaborations found excesses in their data that might be interpreted as coming from a Higgs boson with a mass in the region of 115 to 135 GeV.
  • claim evidence of a new particle only if the probability that the data could be due to a statistical fluctuation is less than 1 in 740
  • claimed only if that probability is less than 1 in 3.5 million, or five sigmas.
  • stringent constraints established by earlier direct and indirect measurements made by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the Tevatron, and other accelerators,
  • place the mass of the Higgs boson within the range of 115 to 127 GeV
  • consistent with the December 2011 announcement of excesses seen in that range by LHC experiments, which searched for the Higgs in different decay patterns
  • None of the
  • experiments
  • are strong enough to claim evidence for the Higgs boson
  • This is an important milestone for the Tevatron experiments, and demonstrates the continuing importance of independent measurements
  • the latest result in a decade-long search by teams of physicists at the Tevatron
  • two collaborations independently combed through hundreds of trillions of proton-antiproton collisions recorded by their experiments to arrive at this exciting result
  • Higgs bosons, if they exist, are short-lived and can decay in many different ways.
  • Higgs can decay into different combinations of particles
  • still much work ahead before the scientific community can say for sure whether the Higgs boson exists
  • According to the Standard Model, the theory that explains and predicts how nature’s building blocks behave and interact with each other, the Higgs boson gives mass to other particles
  • Physicists have known for a long time that the Higgs or something like it must exist
  • Higgs boson is created in a high-energy particle collision, it immediately decays into lighter more stable particles
  • physicists retraced the path of these secondary particles and ruled out processes that mimic its signal.
  • Tevatron was a proton/anti-proton collider, with a maximum center of mass energy of 2 TeV,
  • LHC is a proton/proton collider that will ultimately reach 14 TeV
  • two accelerators collide different pairs of particles at different energies and produce different types of backgrounds
  • search strategies are different
  • search for the Higgs boson by the Tevatron and LHC experiments is like two people taking a picture of a park from different vantage points
Mars Base

The iceberg's accomplice: Did the moon sink the Titanic? - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...s-accomplice-moon-titanic.html

scibyte37

shared by Mars Base on 07 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • The iceberg’s accomplice: Did the moon sink the Titanic?
  • once-in-many-lifetimes event occurred on that Jan. 4
  • moon and sun had lined up in such a way their gravitational pulls enhanced each other
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • suggested that an unusually close approach by the moon on Jan. 4, 1912, may have caused abnormally high tides
  • Where did the killer iceberg come from
  • ultimate cause of the accident was that the ship struck an iceberg
  • well-known as a “spring tide
  • moon’s perigee—closest approach to Earth—proved to be its closest in 1,400 years, and came within six minutes of a full moon
  • Earth’s perihelion—closest approach to the sun—happened the day before
  • the odds of all these variables lining up in just the way they did were, well, astronomical.
  • this configuration maximized the moon’s tide-raising forces on Earth’s oceans
  • researchers looked to see if the enhanced tides caused increased glacial calving
  • to reach the shipping lanes by April
  • any icebergs breaking off the Greenland glaciers in Jan. 1912 would have to move unusually fast and against prevailing currents
  • the answer lies in grounded and stranded icebergs
  • icebergs travel southward, many become stuck in the shallow waters off the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland
  • Normally, icebergs remain in place and cannot resume moving southward until they’ve melted enough to refloat or a high enough tide frees them
  • single iceberg can become stuck multiple times on its journey southward, a process that can take several years
  • unusually high tide in Jan. 1912 would have been enough to dislodge many of those icebergs and move them back into the southbound ocean currents
  • they would have just enough time to reach the shipping lanes for that fateful encounter with the Titanic.
  • But an extremely high spring tide could refloat them
  • ebb tide would carry them back out
  • where the icebergs would resume drifting southward
  • could explain the abundant icebergs in the spring of 1912
  • Mars Base on 07 Mar 12
     
    d Russell Doescher, along with Roger Sinnott, senior contributing editor at Sky & Telescope magazine, publish their findings in the April 2012 edition of Sky & Telescope, on newsstands now. "Of course, the ultimate cause of the accident was that the ship struck an iceberg. The Titanic failed to slow down, even after having received several wireless messages warning of ice ahead," Olson said. "They went full speed into a region with icebergs-that's really what sank the
Mars Base

Preserved bone of Pterosaur found in stomach of Velociraptor - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...ecialized-predators-didnt.html

scibyte37

shared by Mars Base on 07 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Scientists have discovered a bone from a pterosaur (giant flying reptile or 'pterodactyl') in the guts of the skeletal remains of a Velociraptor (small predatory theropod dinosaur) that lived in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia some 75 million years ago.
  • Preserved bone of Pterosaur found in stomach of Velociraptor
  • originally recovered from the Gobi Desert in 1994
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • difficult and probably even dangerous for the small theropod dinosaur to target a pterosaur with a wingspan of 2 metres or more, unless the pterosaur was already ill or injured
  • surface of the bone is smooth and in good condition, with no unusual traces of marks or deformation that could be attributed to digestive acids
  • Further analysis of the skeletal remains of the Velociraptor showed that it was carrying, or recovering from, an injury to its ribs when it died
  • So the pterosaur bone we've identified in the gut of the Velociraptor was most likely scavenged from a carcass
  • likely that the Velociraptor itself died not long after ingesting the bone
  • first time that bones from a pterosaur have been uncovered as gut contents from dinosaur remains
Chris Fisher

Secret Military Mini-Shuttle Marks One Year in Orbit : Discovery News - 0 views

news.discovery.com/...e-marks-one-year-in-orbit.html

orbit military secret

shared by Chris Fisher on 07 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • The military won't say what it has been doing with its experimental miniature space shuttle, but the pilotless spaceship, known as the X-37B, has been in orbit for a year now. The 29-foot robotic spacecraft, also known as the Orbital Test Vehicle, or OTV, was launched on March 5, 2011, on a follow-up flight to extend capabilities demonstrated by a sistership during a 244-day debut mission in 2010.
  • "The X-37B program is setting the standard for a reusable space plane and, on this one-year orbital milestone, has returned great value on the experimental investment,"
  • Amateur satellite watchers last spotted the spaceship on March 4 as it circled between 204 and 212 miles above the planet in an orbit inclined 42.8 degrees relative to the equator.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "Ground tracks that repeat every two to four days are a common feature of U.S. imagery intelligence satellites," Molczan said. "It gives you a fairly frequent revisit of the same targets from the same vantage point."
Mars Base

Heart-powered pacemaker could one day eliminate battery-replacement surgery - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...ttery-replacement-surgery.html

scibyte36 heart health

shared by Mars Base on 04 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • A new power scheme for cardiac pacemakers turns to an unlikely source: vibrations from heartbeats themselves.
  • a device that harvests energy from the reverberation of heartbeats through the chest and converts it to electricity to run a pacemaker or an implanted defibrillator.
  • new energy harvester could save patients from repeated surgeries. That's the only way today to replace the batteries, which last five to 10 years.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • use ambient vibrations that are typically wasted and convert them to electrical energy
  • researchers haven't built a prototype yet
  • made detailed blueprints and run simulations demonstrating that the concept would work
  • A hundredth-of-an-inch thin slice of a special "piezoelectric" ceramic material would essentially catch heartbeat vibrations and briefly expand in response
  • Piezoelectric materials' claim to fame is that they can convert mechanical stress (which causes them to expand) into an electric voltage.
  • have precisely engineered the ceramic layer to a shape that can harvest vibrations across a broad range of frequencies
  • incorporated magnets, whose additional force field can drastically boost the electric signal that results from the vibrations.
  • new device could generate 10 microwatts of power, which is about eight times the amount a pacemaker needs to operate
  • originally designed the harvester for light unmanned airplanes, where it could generate power from wing vibrations
Mars Base

Acidic Europa may eat away at chances for life - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...cidic-europa-chances-life.html

scibyte36 Jupiter Europa

shared by Mars Base on 03 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Europa's interior. The moon is thought to have a metallic core surrounded by a rocky interior, and then a global ocean on top of that surrounded by a shell of water ice
  • ocean underneath the icy shell of Jupiter's moon Europa could be too acid to support life
  • Europa, which is roughly the size of Earth's moon, could possess an ocean about 100 miles deep
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Recent findings even suggest its ocean could be loaded with oxygen, enough to support millions of tons worth of marine life like the kinds that exist on Earth
  • However, chemicals found on the surface of Europa might jeopardize any chances of life evolving there
  • compounds in question are oxidants, which are capable of receiving electrons from other compounds
  • usually rare in the solar system because of the abundance of chemicals known as reductants such as hydrogen and carbon
  • oxidants from Europa's surface might react with sulfides and other compounds in this moon's ocean before life could nab it
  • generating sulfuric and other acids
  • . If this has occurred for just about half of Europa's lifetime, not only would such a process rob the ocean of life-supporting oxidants
  • could become relatively corrosive, with a pH of about 2.6, "about the same as your average soft drink
  • ecosystem would need to evolve quickly to meet this crisis, with oxygen metabolisms and acid tolerance developing in only about 50 million years to handle the acidification
  • analogous to microbes found in acid mine drainage on Earth
  • bright red Río Tinto river in Spain
  • dominant microbes found there are acid-loving "acidophiles" that depend on iron and sulfide as sources of metabolic energy.
  • microbes there have figured out ways of fighting their acidic environment
  • If life did that on Europa, Ganymede, and maybe even Mars, that might have been quite advantageous
  • Others have questioned whether or not rock in Europa's seabed might actually neutralize the effects of this acidity
  • not think this is likely
  • one of the interesting possibilities is that they might have use blue phosphates as their bone material instead to evolve large organisms
Mars Base

Oxygen discovered at Saturn's moon Dione - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...-oxygen-saturn-moon-dione.html

scibyte36 Saturn Dione

shared by Mars Base on 03 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Dione, one of Saturn’s icy moons, has a weak exosphere which includes molecules of oxygen, according to new findings from the Cassini-Huygens mission
  • international mission made the discovery using combined data from one of Cassini’s instruments, called CAPS (Cassini Plasma Spectrometer
  • Dione joins Rhea and the main rings in Saturn's system in having an oxygen rich exosphere
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • It now looks like oxygen production is a universal process wherever an icy moon is bathed in a strong trapped radiation and plasma environment
  • Cassini flew by Dione on 7 April 2010
  • During that flyby
  • molecular oxygen ions near the moon's icy surface
  • used the measurements to estimate the density of the molecular oxygen ions to be in the range of 0.01 to 0.09 ions per cubic centimetre
  • molecular oxygen ions are produced when neutral molecules are ionized; the measurements confirm that a neutral exosphere surrounds Dione.
  • Dione's exosphere is very thin - compared to Earth's atmosphere the density is about a million billionth. The exciting thing is that there is oxygen
Mars Base

Floor of oldest fossilized forest discovered: 385 million years old - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...120301102716.htm

scibyte36

shared by Mars Base on 02 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • the discovery of the floor of the world's oldest forest
  • most exciting part was finding out just how many different types of footprints there were
  • newly uncovered area was preserved in such a way that we were literally able to walk among the trees, noting what kind they were, where they had stood and how big they had grown
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • dating back about 385 million years ago
  • The complexity of the Gilboa site can teach us a lot about the original assembly of our modern day ecosystems
« First ‹ Previous 2321 - 2340 of 2611 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page