5 NASA rockets to light up stretch of East Coast skies

A quintuple rocket launch promises to put on a spectacular, but brief, overnight light show of luminescent vapor trails in the skies above the U.S. East Coast tonight, weather permitting. The sky display may puzzle and amaze some unsuspecting observers, so before you make that phone call to your local news or police, here is why this is happening and when you may see it.

The bright phenomenon will be caused by NASA's Anomalous Transport Rocket Experiment (ATREX), which will launch five chemical-bearing suborbital rockets in about five minutes to test the flow of winds and electrical currents at high altitudes. The rockets will blast off from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va., on the Atlantic coast during a window that opens tonight at midnight EDT and closes at 1:30 a.m. EDT Thursday.

As part of the mission, the five rockets will each release a chemical tracer that should inscribe brilliant milky white trails in the nighttime sky and allow scientists and the general public to actually "see" high-altitude winds at the edge of space, according to a NASA description.

Midnight launch lights
If all goes well, NASA intends to photograph the trails from three different sites: Wallops Island, southern New Jersey and the outer banks of North Carolina. Should weather conditions be unfavorable, the firings will be delayed to another night, with alternate launch dates available between March 16 and April 3.

Three different types of sounding rockets will be used to create the five cloud trails: two Terrier Improved Malemutes, two Terrier Improved Orions and one Terrier Oriole. These small rockets are powerful enough to launch instruments off the planet on short flights, but not strong enough to reach orbit and circle the Earth.

Each rocket will eject a stream of the chemical trimethyl aluminum (TMA), which will be illuminated at high altitudes by the sun (which will be below the local horizon at ground level). Initially, the clouds are expected to glow in reddish hues, then quickly turn to white, They could persist in the sky for as long as 20 minutes before fading completely away.

The ATREX project is aimed at gathering information to better understand the processes responsible for the high-altitude jet stream winds located 60 to 65 miles (97 to 105 kilometers) above the surface of the Earth.

That works out to a potential viewing radius of up to 450 miles (725 km), suggesting that the resultant cloud trails might be glimpsed from perhaps as far north as southern Vermont and New Hampshire, as far south as the border of coastal North and South Carolina and as far west as central West Virginia.

NASA's Goddard, Glenn Centers Look to Lift Space Astronomy out of the Fog

A fogbank is the least useful location for a telescope, yet today's space observatories effectively operate inside one. That's because Venus, Earth and Mars orbit within a vast dust cloud produced by comets and occasional collisions among asteroids. After the sun, this so-called zodiacal cloud is the solar system's most luminous feature, and its light has interfered with infrared, optical and ultraviolet observations made by every astronomical space mission to date.

"To put it simply, it has never been night for space astronomers," said Matthew Greenhouse, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Light from zodiacal dust can be a thousand times brighter than the sources astronomers actually target, limiting sensitivity in much the same way that bright moonlight hampers ground-based observatories. The dust and its unwanted illumination are greatest in the plane of Earth's orbit, the same plane in which every space telescope operates.

Placing future astronomy missions on more tilted orbits would let spacecraft spend significant amounts of time above and below the thickest dust and thereby reduce its impact on observations. So Greenhouse teamed with Scott Benson at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, to investigate how these "dark sky" or extra-zodiacal orbits might improve mission science and to develop a means of cost-effectively reaching them.

"Just by placing a space telescope on these inclined orbits, we can improve its sensitivity by a factor of two in the near-ultraviolet and by 13 times in the infrared," Greenhouse explained. "That's a breakthrough in science capability with absolutely no increase in the size of the telescope's mirror."

Greenhouse, Benson and the COllaborative Modeling and Parametric Assessment of Space Systems (COMPASS) study team at NASA Glenn designed a mission that utilizes new developments in solar arrays, electric propulsion and lower-cost expendable launch vehicles. Their proof-of-concept mission is the Extra-Zodiacal Explorer (EZE), a 1,500-pound EX-class observatory that could accommodate a telescope in the size range of the recently completed WISE mission — all within the cost and schedule constraints of NASA’s Explorer Program.

Launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, EZE would use a powerful new solar-electric drive as an upper stage to direct the spacecraft on a gravity-assist maneuver past Earth or Mars. This flyby would redirect the mission into an orbit inclined by as much as 30 degrees to Earth's.

The result, the scientists say, will be the highest-performance observatory ever achieved in the decades-long history of NASA's Explorer program.

"We see EZE as a game-changer, the first step on a new path for NASA Explorers that will yield major science goals despite limited resources," said Benson, who previously managed the new electric propulsion technology project.

Solar storm shakes Earth magnetic field

WASHINGTON (AP) — A solar storm shook the Earth's magnetic field early Friday, but scientists said they had no reports of any problems with electrical systems.

After reports Thursday of the storm fizzling out, a surge of activity prompted space weather forecasters to issue alerts about changes in the magnetic field.

"We really haven't had any reports from power system operators yet," Rob Steenburgh, a space weather forecaster at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo., said early Friday. "But sometimes they don't come in until after the storm."

He said the storm reached a moderate level late Thursday, before going to a strong level early Friday. For most of Thursday, it was rated as minor.

Scientists say such storms don't pose a threat to people, just technology.

The space weather center's website says a storm rated as strong could force corrections to voltage systems and trigger false alarms on some protection devices, as well as increase drag on satellites and affect their orientation.

The forecasters weren't aware of any significant impact to electrical or technological systems, but said there was a two-hour blackout of high frequency radio communications — affecting mainly ham radio operations — stretching from eastern Africa to eastern Australia.

Steenburgh also said that there was another solar flare late Thursday, similar to the one a few days ago that set off the current storm.

"Right now we're still analyzing when it will arrive" and how strong it could be, he said.

The space weather center had reports of Northern Lights across Canada and dipping into the northern tier of U.S. states, Steenburgh said.

While some experts thought the threat from the solar storm passed by earlier Thursday, the space weather center maintained the storm's effects could continue through Friday morning.

The current storm, which started with a solar flare Tuesday evening, caused a stir Wednesday because forecasts were for a strong storm with the potential to knock electrical grids offline, mess with GPS and harm satellites. It even forced airlines to reroute a few flights on Thursday.

It was never seen as a threat to people, just technology, and teased skywatchers with the prospect of colorful Northern Lights dipping further south.

But when the storm finally arrived around 6 a.m. EST Thursday, after traveling at 2.7 million mph, it was more a magnetic breeze than a gale. The power stayed on. So did GPS and satellites. And the promise of auroras seemed to be more of a mirage.

Scientists initially figured the storm would be the worst since 2006, but now seems only as bad as ones a few months ago, said Joe Kunches, a scientist at the NOAA center. The strongest storm in recorded history was probably in 1859, he said.

"It's not a terribly strong event. It's a very interesting event," Kunches said.

Forecasters can predict the speed a solar storm travels and its strength, but the north-south orientation is the wild card. This time it was a northern orientation, which is "pretty benign," Kunches said. Southern would have caused the most damaging technological disruption and biggest auroras.

On Thursday, North American utilities didn't report any problems, said Kimberly Mielcarek, spokeswoman for the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a consortium of electricity grid operators. Her office didn't respond to a phone call early Friday.

NASA Mars Orbiter Catches Twister in Action

An afternoon whirlwind on Mars lofts a twisting column of dust more than half a mile (800 meters) high in an image from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

HiRISE captured the image on Feb. 16, 2012, while the orbiter passed over the Amazonis Planitia region of northern Mars. In the area observed, paths of many previous whirlwinds, or dust devils, are visible as streaks on the dusty surface.

The active dust devil displays a delicate arc produced by a westerly breeze partway up its height. The dust plume is about 30 yards or meters in diameter.

The image was taken during the time of Martian year when that planet is farthest from the sun. Just as on Earth, winds on Mars are powered by solar heating. Exposure to the sun's rays declines during this season, yet even now, dust devils act relentlessly to clean the surface of freshly deposited dust, a little at a time.

Dust devils occur on Earth as well as on Mars. They are 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 when the ground is heated by the sun, warming the air just above the ground. As heated air near the surface rises quickly through a small pocket of cooler air above it, the air may begin to rotate, if conditions are just right.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been examining Mars with six science instruments since 2006. Now in an extended mission, the orbiter continues to provide insights into the planet's ancient environments and how processes such as wind, meteorite impacts and seasonal frosts continue to affect the Martian surface today. This mission has returned more data about Mars than all other orbital and surface missions combined.

More than 21,700 images taken by HiRISE are available for viewing on the instrument team's website: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu . Each observation by this telescopic camera covers several square miles, or square kilometers, and can reveal features as small as a desk.

NASA finds thickest parts of Arctic ice cap melting faster

A new NASA study revealed that the oldest and thickest Arctic sea ice is disappearing at a faster rate than the younger and thinner ice at the edges of the Arctic Ocean's floating ice cap. The thicker ice, known as multi-year ice, survives through the cyclical summer melt season, when young ice that has formed over winter just as quickly melts again. The rapid disappearance of older ice makes Arctic sea ice even more vulnerable to further decline in the summer, said Joey Comiso, senior scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., and author of the study, which was recently published in Journal of Climate.

The new research takes a closer look at how multi-year ice, ice that has made it through at least two summers, has diminished with each passing winter over the last three decades. Multi-year ice "extent" -- which includes all areas of the Arctic Ocean where multi-year ice covers at least 15 percent of the ocean surface -- is diminishing at a rate of -15.1 percent per decade, the study found.

There's another measurement that allows researchers to analyze how the ice cap evolves: multi-year ice "area," which discards areas of open water among ice floes and focuses exclusively on the regions of the Arctic Ocean that are completely covered by multi-year ice. Sea ice area is always smaller than sea ice extent, and it gives scientists the information needed to estimate the total volume of ice in the Arctic Ocean. Comiso found that multi-year ice area is shrinking even faster than multi-year ice extent, by -17.2 percent per decade.

"The average thickness of the Arctic sea ice cover is declining because it is rapidly losing its thick component, the multi-year ice. At the same time, the surface temperature in the Arctic is going up, which results in a shorter ice-forming season," Comiso said. "It would take a persistent cold spell for most multi-year sea ice and other ice types to grow thick enough in the winter to survive the summer melt season and reverse the trend."

Scientists differentiate multi-year ice from both seasonal ice, which comes and goes each year, and "perennial" ice, defined as all ice that has survived at least one summer. In other words: all multi-year ice is perennial ice, but not all perennial ice is multi-year ice (it can also be second-year ice).

Comiso found that perennial ice extent is shrinking at a rate of -12.2 percent per decade, while its area is declining at a rate of -13.5 percent per decade. These numbers indicate that the thickest ice, multiyear-ice, is declining faster than the other perennial ice that surrounds it.

As perennial ice retreated in the last three decades, it opened up new areas of the Arctic Ocean that could then be covered by seasonal ice in the winter. A larger volume of younger ice meant that a larger portion of it made it through the summer and was available to form second-year ice. This is likely the reason why the perennial ice cover, which includes second year ice, is not declining as rapidly as the multiyear ice cover, Comiso said.

Multi-year sea ice hit its record minimum extent in the winter of 2008. That is when it was reduced to about 55 percent of its average extent since the late 1970s, when satellite measurements of the ice cap began. Multi-year sea ice then recovered slightly in the three following years, ultimately reaching an extent 34 percent larger than in 2008, but it dipped again in winter of 2012, to its second lowest extent ever.

Alien Genetic Material

Astrobiologists are not certain whether alien would be a carbon-based like or not. Experiments are currently focusing on building alternative kinds of genetic codes and how these codes could evolve.

One of the interesting topics discussed during a public event featuring biologist Richard Dawkins and physicist Lawrence Krauss was the thought that life could be built with an alien biochemistry. The event was attended by more than 3,000 people and was held at Arizona State University in Tempe.

Dawkins said that 99 percent of living things that used to exist are no longer in existence.

Krauss said that laws of physics and chemistry might favor carbon-based life resembling human.

Dawkins said that it is possible that life could exist in more diverse forms, provided that it has a code-carrying system just like DNA, copying itself with high fidelity.

In the same university, biochemist John Chaput was creating what he called TNA, an alternative version of DNA. He published the first evidence that TNA can undergo Darwinian evolution in January. Chaput agrees to Dawkins the need for genetic material for life to exist in more diverse forms just like DNA and RNA.

Alternative code-carriers were also experimented by NASA. The space agency claimed that scientists tried to substitute arsenic phosphorus of bacteria in their DNA. However, they never presented enough evidence that alternative life really existed, according to chemist Steve Benner.

Biochemist Rosemary Redfield duplicated the same process but the bacteria failed to grow when fed arsenic and no phosphorus.

Alien Ship Allegedly Found by Apollo 16 Astronauts

Moon explorations have been carried out not only by the U.S. and Russia but also countries from Asia including Japan, China and India. Even the European Space Agency has also sent robotic spacecraft to the moon.

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) of NASA is most likely the most productive among all moon explorations as it already gathered almost a million pictures on the surface of the moon that are so vivid, even a coffee table can be seen in the midst of boulders.

Citizen science program has been encouraged by physicist and astrobiologist Paul Davies to examine closely these public-accessible photos of LRO to locate any artifacts that are extraterrestrial in origin.

However, parapsychology followers believe that NASA has been hiding evidence of aliens discovered on the surface of the moon. They say mind-travelers, who use a psychic technique known as remote viewing to travel other planets, have seen alien-looking things on the lunar surface.

The popularity of remote viewing started when U.S. government supported different parapsychology studies in 1970s and lasted until 1990s. After the funding was ended, an executive summary concluded that the psychic technique test results were “vague and ambiguous.”

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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope discovers Black Hole surrounded by Star Cluster

Astronomers know how massive stars collapse to form black holes but it is not clear how supermassive black holes, which can weigh billions of times the mass of our sun, form in the cores of galaxies. One idea is that supermassive black holes may build up through the merger of smaller black holes.

Sean Farrell of the Sydney Institute for Astronomy in Australia discovered a middleweight black hole in 2009 using the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray space telescope. Known as HLX-1 (Hyper-Luminous X-ray source 1), the black hole has an estimated weight of about 20,000 solar masses. It lies towards the edge of the galaxy ESO 243-49, 290 million light-years from Earth.

Farrell then observed HLX-1 simultaneously with NASA’s Swift observatory in X-ray and Hubble in near infrared, optical and ultraviolet wavelengths. The intensity and the color of the light may indicate the presence of a young, massive cluster of blue stars, perhaps 250-light-years across, encircling the black hole. Hubble can’t resolve the stars individually because the suspected cluster is too far away. The brightness and color is consistent with other clusters of stars seen in other galaxies, but some of the light may be coming from the gaseous disk around the black hole.

“Before this latest discovery, we suspected that intermediate-mass black holes could exist, but now we understand where they may have come from,” Farrell said. “The fact that there seems to be a very young cluster of stars indicates that the intermediate-mass black hole may have originated as the central black hole in a very-low-mass dwarf galaxy. The dwarf galaxy might then have been swallowed by the more massive galaxy, just as happens in our Milky Way.”

From the signature of the X-rays, Farrell’s team knew there would be some blue light emitted from the high temperature of the hot gas in the disk swirling around the black hole. They couldn’t account for the red light coming from the disk. It would have to be produced by a much cooler gas, and they concluded this would most likely come from stars.

Infrared Sounder on NASA's Suomi NPP Starts its Mission

A powerful new infrared instrument, flying on NASA's newest polar-orbiting satellite, designed to give scientists more refined information about Earth's atmosphere and improve weather forecasts and our understanding of climate, has started sending its data back to Earth.

The Cross-track Infrared Sounder (CrIS) joins four other new instruments aboard the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite, which NASA launched on Oct. 28, 2011 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The Suomi NPP mission is the bridge between NOAA's Polar Operational Environmental Satellite (POES) and NASA's Earth Observing System satellites and the next-generation Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS).

Since it reached orbit, Suomi NPP and its suite of five instruments are undergoing extensive checkouts before starting regular science observations. Suomi NPP is the result of a partnership between NASA, NOAA and the Department of Defense.

CrIS, an advanced spectrometer with 1,305 infrared spectral channels, is designed to provide high vertical resolution information on the atmosphere's three-dimensional structure of temperature and water vapor. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) on the EOS Aqua mission, launched in 2002, demonstrated how useful this type of data could be for understanding the atmosphere. CrIS will continue this data record and provide data for use in NOAA's numerical weather prediction models to forecast severe weather days in advance.

"Significant overlap between AIRS and CrIS will provide the Earth science research community the ability to maintain the unprecedented accuracy and stability of the temperature and moisture data record initiated by AIRS," said Diane Wickland, Suomi NPP program scientist at NASA Headquarters.

"Having data from CrIS will only improve the quality, timeliness and accuracy of NOAA's weather and climate predictions, which directly affect everyone in America," said Mary Kicza, assistant administrator for NOAA's Satellite and Information Service (NESDIS).

"Over longer periods, data from CrIS will help NOAA to better understand climate phenomena such as El Niño and La Niña that impact global weather patterns," said Mitch Goldberg, NOAA's JPSS program scientist.

The Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS), which measures temperature and humidity in both clear and cloudy conditions, was the first Suomi NPP instrument activated. ATMS and CrIS data together will be used operationally in weather forecasts beginning in the Spring of 2012.

NASA Enhances Solar squall Forecasting

Space agency uses technology to generate up to 100 computerized forecasts to enhanced predict the path and effect of solar storms.

NASA is applying existing technology called "ensemble forecasting" that's been used to predict hurricanes in its observations of solar weather to better predict the trail and effect of solar storms.

The use of the computational predictive technique couldn't come as a better time, as the sun is entering its solar maximum, or period of maximum activity, which will spur an increase in space weather, according to the agency.

Researchers at the Space Weather Laboratory of Goddard Space Flight Research Center have begun to implement ensemble forecasting--which allows them to produce as many as 100 computerized forecasts at once--with full accomplishment in three years' time, according to NASA.

Support from NASA's Space Technology Program Game Changing Program is allowing for the use of the technology, which meteorologists already use to track the potential trail or impact of hurricanes and other forms of severe weather.

Indeed, solar flare and storm activity has increased in latest months as the sun begins to wake up from years of relative inactivity, according to NASA. To organize for it, the agency has been working for some time to improve its forecasting of solar weather.

The sun emitted two considerable corona mass ejections (CMEs)--or billion-ton clouds of solar plasma launched by sun explosions--in the last six months, one on Aug 4 and one in mid January, the latter of which caused some airlines to divert flights. And earlier this week, the most powerful solar flare so far this year erupted from the similar region that caused last week's CME.

As the sun enters its peak of activity, CMEs become more frequent and can affect planets or spacecrafts in their path, as well as disrupt satellite-based communications or power grids on earth.