2014 Articles:

(Dateline: December 2014) Keeping an Eye on Storms and More

(Dateline: November 2014) Where the Heavenliest of Showers Come From

(Dateline: October 2014) Space Place in a Snap: Where Does the Sun's Energy Come From?

(Dateline: September 2014) Twinkle, Twinkle, Variable Star

(Dateline: August 2014) Droughts, Floods and the Earth's Gravity, by the GRACE of NASA

(Dateline: July 2014) The Invisible Shield of our Sun

(Dateline: June 2014) A Glorious Gravitational Lens

(Dateline: May 2014) The Hottest Planet in the Solar System

(Dateline: April 2014) The Power of the Sun's Engines

(Dateline: March 2014) Old Tool, New Use: GPS and the Terrestrial Reference Frame

(Dateline: February 2014) A Two-Toned Wonder from the Saturnian Outskirts

(Dateline: January 2014) Surprising Young Stars in the Oldest Places in the Universe

Keeping an Eye on Storms and More

By Kieran Mulvaney

In late July 2013, Tropical Storm Flossie barreled furiously toward Hawaii. The question was not if it would strike, but when and where it might do so.

During the afternoon hours of July 29, forecasts predicted landfall later that week on the state’s Big Island; however, by the time residents of the 50th state awoke the following morning things had changed. NOAA’s Central Pacific Hurricane Center warned that the islands of Oahu, Molokai and Maui were now at a greater risk.

This overnight recalculation was thanks to the Day/Night Band viewing capabilities of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite, or VIIRS, on board the Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite. VIIRS is able to collect visible imagery at night, according to Mitch Goldberg, program scientist for NOAA’s Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS), of which Suomi NPP is a part. That means it was able to spot some high-level circulation further north than expected during the nighttime hours. This was an important observation which impacted the whole forecast. Without this forecast, said the Hurricane Center’s Tom Evans, “we would have basically been guessing on Tropical Storm Flossie's center.”

Polar-orbiting satellites, like Suomi NPP and the future JPSS-1 and JPSS-2 (scheduled for launch in 2017 and 2021, respectively), sweep in a longitudinal path over Earth as the planet rotates beneath them—scanning the globe twice a day. VIIRS, the imager that will be aboard all the JPSS satellites, images 3,000 km-wide swaths on each orbit, with each swath overlapping the next by 200 km to ensure uninterrupted global coverage. This high-resolution, rapidly updating coverage allows researchers to see weather patterns change in near real-time.

Instruments on Suomi NPP allow scientists to study such long-term changes too—things like, “the patterns of sea surface temperature, or coral bleaching,” says Goldberg. They are even used by the World Bank to determine how much energy is burned off and wasted from natural gas flares on oil drilling platforms.

While scientists are excited by the JPSS series’ wide range of capabilities, the ability to address pressing immediate concerns is, for many, the most tangible value. That was certainly the case in July 2013, when thanks to Suomi NPP, authorities had ample time to close ports and facilities, open shelters, activate emergency procedures, and issue flash flood warnings. Despite heavy rains, high surf, and widespread power outages, accidents and injuries were few. By the time the storm passed, Hawaii was soaked.

But it was largely unharmed.

Learn more about JPSS here: http://www.jpss.noaa.gov.

Kids can learn all about how hurricanes form at NASA’s Space Place: http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/hurricanes.

Caption: S-NPP captured this image of Tropical Storm Flossie heading toward Hawaii using its VIIRS Combined Day-Night Band sensor. Credit: NOAA.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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Where the Heavenliest of Showers Come From

By Dr. Ethan Siegel

You might think that, so long as Earth can successfully dodge the paths of rogue asteroids and comets that hurtle our way, it's going to be smooth, unimpeded sailing in our annual orbit around the sun. But the meteor showers that illuminate the night sky periodically throughout the year not only put on spectacular shows for us, they're direct evidence that interplanetary space isn't so empty after all!

When comets (or even asteroids) enter the inner solar system, they heat up, develop tails, and experience much larger tidal forces than they usually experience. Small pieces of the original object—often multiple kilometers in diameter—break off with each pass near the sun, continuing in an almost identical orbit, either slightly ahead-or-behind the object's main nucleus. While both the dust and ion tails are blown well off of the main orbit, the small pieces that break off are stretched, over time, into a diffuse ellipse following the same orbit as the comet or asteroid it arose from. And each time the Earth crosses the path of that orbit, the potential for a meteor shower is there, even after the parent comet or asteroid is completely gone!

This relationship was first uncovered by the British astronomer John Couch Adams, who found that the Leonid dust trail must have an orbital period of 33.25 years, and that the contemporaneously discovered comet Tempel-Tuttle shared its orbit. The most famous meteor showers in the night sky all have parent bodies identified with them, including the Lyrids (comet Thatcher), the Perseids (comet Swift-Tuttle), and what promises to be the best meteor shower of 2014: the Geminids (asteroid 3200 Phaethon). With an orbit of only 1.4 years, the Geminids have increased in strength since they first appeared in the mid-1800s, from only 10-to-20 meteors per hour up to more than 100 per hour at their peak today! Your best bet to catch the most is the night of December 13th, when they ought to be at maximum, before the Moon rises at about midnight.

The cometary (or asteroidal) dust density is always greatest around the parent body itself, so whenever it enters the inner solar system and the Earth passes near to it, there's a chance for a meteor storm, where observers at dark sky sites might see thousands of meteors an hour! The Leonids are well known for this, having presented spectacular shows in 1833, 1866, 1966 and a longer-period storm in the years 1998-2002. No meteor storms are anticipated for the immediate future, but the heavenliest of showers will continue to delight skywatchers for all the foreseeable years to come!

What’s the best way to see a meteor shower? Check out this article to find out: http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/asteroids/best-meteor-showers .

Kids can learn all about meteor showers at NASA’s Space Place: http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/meteor-shower.

Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / W. Reach (SSC/Caltech), of Comet 73P/Schwassman-Wachmann 3, via NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, 2006.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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Space Place in a Snap: Where Does the Sun's Energy Come From?

By The Space Place Team

This month, the Space Place is doing something a little bit different for our monthly column — providing you with a beautifully informative and educational poster about the mechanics of our sun. This poster accompanies our latest "Space Place in a Snap" animation. This "Snap" series is a set of narrated videos and posters that, together, explain basic scientific concepts in a dynamic new medium. Entertaining in their own right, we also wish to bring this new resource to your attention as an educational tool. In this edition, we address the important question of why our sun is so hot.

To download the poster as a pdf, click here: http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/review/partners/2014-10/2014/sun-snap.pdf.

To see the video that goes along with this poster, visit: http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/sun-heat.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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Twinkle, Twinkle, Variable Star

By Dr. Ethan Siegel

As bright and steady as they appear, the stars in our sky won't shine forever. The steady brilliance of these sources of light is powered by a tumultuous interior, where nuclear processes fuse light elements and isotopes into heavier ones. Because the heavier nuclei up to iron (Fe), have a greater binding energies-per-nucleon, each reaction results in a slight reduction of the star's mass, converting it into energy via Einstein's famous equation relating changes in mass and energy output, E = mc2. Over timescales of tens of thousands of years, that energy migrates to the star's photosphere, where it's emitted out into the universe as starlight.

There's only a finite amount of fuel in there, and when stars run out, the interior contracts and heats up, often enabling heavier elements to burn at even higher temperatures, and causing sun-like stars to grow into red giants. Even though the cores of both hydrogen-burning and helium-burning stars have consistent, steady energy outputs, our sun's overall brightness varies by just ~0.1%, while red giants can have their brightness’s vary by factors of thousands or more over the course of a single year! In fact, the first periodic or pulsating variable star ever discovered—Mira (omicron Ceti)—behaves exactly in this way.

There are many types of variable stars, including Cepheids, RR Lyrae, cataclysmic variables and more, but it's the Mira-type variables that give us a glimpse into our Sun's likely future. In general, the cores of stars burn through their fuel in a very consistent fashion, but in the case of pulsating variable stars the outer layers of stellar atmospheres vary. Initially heating up and expanding, they overshoot equilibrium, reach a maximum size, cool, then often forming neutral molecules that behave as light-blocking dust, with the dust then falling back to the star, ionizing and starting the whole process over again. This temporarily neutral dust absorbs the visible light from the star and re-emits it, but as infrared radiation, which is invisible to our eyes. In the case of Mira (and many red giants), it's Titanium Monoxide (TiO) that causes it to dim so severely, from a maximum magnitude of +2 or +3 (clearly visible to the naked eye) to a minimum of +9 or +10, requiring a telescope (and an experienced observer) to find!

Visible in the constellation of Cetus during the fall-and-winter from the Northern Hemisphere, Mira is presently at magnitude +7 and headed towards its minimum, but will reach its maximum brightness again in May of next year and every 332 days thereafter. Shockingly, Mira contains a huge, 13 light-year-long tail -- visible only in the UV -- that it leaves as it rockets through the interstellar medium at 130 km/sec! Look for it in your skies all winter long, and contribute your results to the AAVSO (American Association of Variable Star Observers) International Database to help study its long-term behavior!

Check out some cool images and simulated animations of Mira here: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/galex/20070815/v.html.

Kids can learn all about Mira at NASA’s Space Place: http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/mira/en/.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Caption and Images credit: NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) spacecraft, of Mira and its tail in UV light (top); Margarita Karovska (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA) / NASA's Hubble Space Telescope image of Mira, with the distortions revealing the presence of a binary companion (lower left); public domain image of Orion, the Pleiades and Mira (near maximum brightness) by Brocken Inaglory of Wikimedia Commons under CC-BY-SA-3.0 (lower right).

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Droughts, Floods and the Earth's Gravity, by the GRACE of NASA

By Dr. Ethan Siegel

When you think about gravitation here on Earth, you very likely think about how constant it is, at 9.8 m/s2 (32 ft/s2). Only, that's not quite right. Depending on how thick the Earth's crust is, whether you're slightly closer to or farther from the Earth's center, or what the density of the material beneath you is, you'll experience slight variations in Earth's gravity as large as 0.2%, something you'd need to account for if you were a pendulum-clock-maker.

But surprisingly, the amount of water content stored on land in the Earth actually changes the gravity field of where you are by a significant, measurable amount. Over land, water is stored in lakes, rivers, aquifers, soil moisture, snow and glaciers. Even a change of just a few centimeters in the water table of an area can be clearly discerned by our best space-borne mission: NASA's twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites.

Since its 2002 launch, GRACE has seen the water-table-equivalent of the United States (and the rest of the world) change significantly over that time. Groundwater supplies are vital for agriculture and provide half of the world's drinking water. Yet GRACE has seen California's central valley and the southern high plains rapidly deplete their groundwater reserves, endangering a significant portion of the nation's food supply. Meanwhile, the upper Missouri River Basin—recently home to severe flooding—continues to see its water table rise.

NASA's GRACE satellites are the only pieces of equipment currently capable of making these global, precision measurements, providing our best knowledge for mitigating these terrestrial changes. Thanks to GRACE, we've been able to quantify the water loss of the Colorado River Basin (65 cubic kilometers), add months to the lead-time water managers have for flood prediction, and better predict the impacts of droughts worldwide. As NASA scientist Matthew Rodell says, "[W]ithout GRACE we would have no routine, global measurements of changes in groundwater availability. Other satellites can’t do it, and ground-based monitoring is inadequate." Even though the GRACE satellites are nearing the end of their lives, the GRACE Follow-On satellites will be launched in 2017, providing us with this valuable data far into the future. Although the climate is surely changing, it's water availability, not sea level rise, that's the largest near-term danger, and the most important aspect we can work to understand!

Learn more about NASA’s GRACE mission here: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/Grace/.

Kids can learn all about launching objects into Earth’s orbit by shooting a (digital) cannonball on NASA’s Space Place website. Check it out at: http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/how-orbits-work/.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen, using GRACE data provide courtesy of Jay Famigleitti, University of California Irvine and Matthew Rodell, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Caption by Holli Riebeek.

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The Invisible Shield of our Sun

By Dr. Ethan Siegel

Whether you look at the planets within our solar system, the stars within our galaxy or the galaxies spread throughout the universe, it's striking how empty outer space truly is. Even though the largest concentrations of mass are separated by huge distances, interstellar space isn't empty: it's filled with dilute amounts of gas, dust, radiation and ionized plasma. Although we've long been able to detect these components remotely, it's only since 2012 that a manmade spacecraft --Voyager 1 -- successfully entered and gave our first direct measurements of the interstellar medium (ISM).

What we found was an amazing confirmation of the idea that our Sun creates a humongous "shield" around our solar system, the heliosphere, where the outward flux of the solar wind crashes against the ISM. Over 100 AU in radius, the heliosphere prevents the ionized plasma from the ISM from nearing the planets, asteroids and Kuiper belt objects contained within it. How? In addition to various wavelengths of light, the Sun is also a tremendous source of fast-moving, charged particles (mostly protons) that move between 300 and 800 km/s, or nearly 0.3% the speed of light. To achieve these speeds, these particles originate from the Sun's superheated corona, with temperatures in excess of 1,000,000 Kelvin!

When Voyager 1 finally left the heliosphere, it found a 40-fold increase in the density of ionized plasma particles. In addition, traveling beyond the heliopause showed a tremendous rise in the flux of intermediate-to-high energy cosmic ray protons, proving that our Sun shields our solar system quite effectively. Finally, it showed that the outer edges of the heliosheath consist of two zones, where the solar wind slows and then stagnates, and disappears altogether when you pass beyond the heliopause.

Unprotected passage through interstellar space would be life-threatening, as young stars, nebulae, and other intense energy sources pass perilously close to our solar system on ten-to-hundred-million-year timescales. Yet those objects pose no major danger to terrestrial life, as our Sun's invisible shield protects us from all but the rarer, highest energy cosmic particles. Even if we pass through a region like the Orion Nebula, our heliosphere keeps the vast majority of those dangerous ionized particles from impacting us, shielding even the solar system's outer worlds quite effectively. NASA spacecraft like the Voyagers, IBEX and SOHO continue to teach us more about our great cosmic shield and the ISM's irregularities. We're not helpless as we hurtle through it; the heliosphere gives us all the protection we need!

Want to learn more about Voyager 1’s trip into interstellar space? Check this out: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-278.

Kids can test their knowledge about the Sun at NASA’s Space place: http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/solar-tricktionary/.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Caption and Image credit: Hubble Heritage Team (AURA / STScI), C. R. O'Dell (Vanderbilt), and NASA, of the star LL Orionis and its heliosphere interacting with interstellar gas and plasma near the edge of the Orion Nebula (M42). Unlike our star, LL Orionis displays a bow shock, something our Sun will regain when the ISM next collides with us at a sufficiently large relative velocity.

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A Glorious Gravitational Lens

By Dr. Ethan Siegel

As we look at the universe on larger and larger scales, from stars to galaxies to groups to the largest galaxy clusters, we become able to perceive objects that are significantly farther away. But as we consider these larger classes of objects, they don't merely emit increased amounts of light, but they also contain increased amounts of mass. Under the best of circumstances, these gravitational clumps can open up a window to the distant universe well beyond what any astronomer could hope to see otherwise.

The oldest style of telescope is the refractor, where light from an arbitrarily distant source is passed through a converging lens. The incoming light rays—initially spread over a large area—are brought together at a point on the opposite side of the lens, with light rays from significantly closer sources bent in characteristic ways as well. While the universe doesn't consist of large optical lenses, mass itself is capable of bending light in accord with Einstein's theory of General Relativity, and acts as a gravitational lens!

The first prediction that real-life galaxy clusters would behave as such lenses came from Fritz Zwicky in 1937. These foreground masses would lead to multiple images and distorted arcs of the same lensed background object, all of which would be magnified as well. It wasn't until 1979, however, that this process was confirmed with the observation of the Twin Quasar: QSO 0957+561. Gravitational lensing requires a serendipitous alignment of a massive foreground galaxy cluster with a background galaxy (or cluster) in the right location to be seen by an observer at our location, but the universe is kind enough to provide us with many such examples of this good fortune, including one accessible to astrophotographers with 11" scopes and larger: Abell 2218.

Located in the Constellation of Draco at position (J2000): R.A. 16h 35m 54s, Dec. +66° 13' 00" (about 2° North of the star 18 Draconis), Abell 2218 is an extremely massive cluster of about 10,000 galaxies located 2 billion light years away, but it's also located quite close to the zenith for northern hemisphere observers, making it a great target for deep-sky astrophotography. Multiple images and sweeping arcs abound between magnitudes 17 and 20, and include galaxies at a variety of redshifts ranging from z=0.7 all the way up to z=2.5, with farther ones at even fainter magnitudes unveiled by Hubble. For those looking for an astronomical challenge this summer, take a shot at Abell 2218, a cluster responsible for perhaps the most glorious gravitational lens visible from Earth!

Learn about current efforts to study gravitational lensing using NASA facilities: http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/january/nasas-fermi-makes-first-gamma-ray-study-of-a-gravitational-lens/.

Kids can learn about gravity at NASA’s Space Place: http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/what-is-gravity/.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Caption: Abel 2218. Image credit: NASA, ESA, and Johan Richard (Caltech). Acknowledgement: Davide de Martin & James Long (ESA/Hubble).

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The Hottest Planet in the Solar System

By Dr. Ethan Siegel

When you think about the four rocky planets in our Solar System—Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars—you probably think about them in that exact order: sorted by their distance from the Sun. It wouldn't surprise you all that much to learn that the surface of Mercury reaches daytime temperatures of up to 800°F (430°C), while the surface of Mars never gets hotter than 70°F (20°C) during summer at the equator. On both of these worlds, however, temperatures plummet rapidly during the night; Mercury reaches lows of -280°F (-173°C) while Mars, despite having a day comparable to Earth's in length, will have a summer's night at the equator freeze to temperatures of -100°F (-73°C).

Those temperature extremes from day-to-night don't happen so severely here on Earth, thanks to our atmosphere that's some 140 times thicker than that of Mars. Our average surface temperature is 57°F (14°C), and day-to-night temperature swings are only tens of degrees. But if our world were completely airless, like Mercury, we'd have day-to-night temperature swings that were hundreds of degrees. Additionally, our average surface temperature would be significantly colder, at around 0°F (-18°C), as our atmosphere functions like a blanket: trapping a portion of the heat radiated by our planet and making the entire atmosphere more uniform in temperature.

But it's the second planet from the Sun -- Venus -- that puts the rest of the rocky planets' atmospheres to shame. With an atmosphere 93 times as thick as Earth's, made up almost entirely of carbon dioxide, Venus is the ultimate planetary greenhouse, letting sunlight in but hanging onto that heat with incredible effectiveness. Despite being nearly twice as far away from the Sun as Mercury, and hence only receiving 29% the sunlight-per-unit-area, the surface of Venus is a toasty 864°F (462°C), with no difference between day-and-night temperatures! Even though Venus takes hundreds of Earth days to rotate, its winds circumnavigate the entire planet every four days (with speeds of 220 mph / 360 kph), making day-and-night temperature differences irrelevant.

Catch the hottest planet in our Solar System all spring-and-summer long in the pre-dawn skies, as it waxes towards its full phase, moving away from the Earth and towards the opposite side of the Sun, which it will finally slip behind in November. A little atmospheric greenhouse effect seems to be exactly what we need here on Earth, but as much as Venus? No thanks!

Check out these “10 Need-to-Know Things About Venus”: http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Venus .

Kids can learn more about the crazy weather on Venus and other places in the Solar System at NASA’s Space Place: http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/planet-weather.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Caption: NASA's Pioneer Venus Orbiter image of Venus's upper-atmosphere clouds as seen in the ultraviolet, 1979.

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The Power of the Sun's Engines

By Dr. Ethan Siegel

Here on Earth, the sun provides us with the vast majority of our energy, striking the top of the atmosphere with up to 1,000 Watts of power per square meter, albeit highly dependent on the sunlight's angle-of-incidence. But remember that the sun is a whopping 150 million kilometers away, and sends an equal amount of radiation in all directions; the Earth-facing direction is nothing special. Even considering sunspots, solar flares, and long-and-short term variations in solar irradiance, the sun's energy output is always constant to about one-part-in-1,000. All told, our parent star consistently outputs an estimated 4 × 1026 Watts of power; one second of the sun's emissions could power all the world's energy needs for over 700,000 years.

That's a literally astronomical amount of energy, and it comes about thanks to the hugeness of the sun. With a radius of 700,000 kilometers, it would take 109 Earths, lined up from end-to-end, just to go across the diameter of the sun once. Unlike our Earth, however, the sun is made up of around 70% hydrogen by mass, and it's the individual protons ­— or the nuclei of hydrogen atoms — that fuse together, eventually becoming helium-4 and releasing a tremendous amount of energy. All told, for every four protons that wind up becoming helium-4, a tiny bit of mass — just 0.7% of the original amount — gets converted into energy by E=mc2, and that's where the sun's power originates.

You'd be correct in thinking that fusing ~4 × 1038 protons-per-second gives off a tremendous amount of energy, but remember that nuclear fusion occurs in a huge region of the sun: about the innermost quarter (in radius) is where 99% of it is actively taking place. So there might be 4 × 1026 Watts of power put out, but that's spread out over 2.2 × 1025 cubic meters, meaning the sun's energy output per-unit-volume is just 18 W / m3. Compare this to the average human being, whose basal metabolic rate is equivalent to around 100 Watts, yet takes up just 0.06 cubic meters of space. In other words, you emit 100 times as much energy-per-unit-volume as the sun! It's only because the sun is so large and massive that its power is so great.

It's this slow process, releasing huge amounts of energy per reaction over an incredibly large volume, that has powered life on our world throughout its entire history. It may not appear so impressive if you look at just a tiny region, but — at least for our sun — that huge size really adds up!

Check out these “10 Need-to-Know Things About the Sun”: http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Sun .

Kids can learn more about an intriguing solar mystery at NASA’s Space Place: http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/sun-corona.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Caption: Composite of 25 images of the sun, showing solar outburst/activity over a 365 day period. Image credit: NASA/Solar Dynamics Observatory/Atmospheric Imaging Assembly/S. Wiessinger; post-processing by E. Siegel.

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Old Tool, New Use: GPS and the Terrestrial Reference Frame

By Alex H. Kasprak

Flying over 1300 kilometers above Earth, the Jason 2 satellite knows its distance from the ocean down to a matter of centimeters, allowing for the creation of detailed maps of the ocean’s surface. This information is invaluable to oceanographers and climate scientists. By understanding the ocean’s complex topography—its barely perceptible hills and troughs—these scientists can monitor the pace of sea level rise, unravel the intricacies of ocean currents, and project the effects of future climate change.

But these measurements would be useless if there were not some frame of reference to put them in context. A terrestrial reference frame, ratified by an international group of scientists, serves that purpose. “It’s a lot like air,” says JPL scientist Jan Weiss. “It’s all around us and is vitally important, but people don’t really think about it.” Creating such a frame of reference is more of a challenge than you might think, though. No point on the surface of Earth is truly fixed.

To create a terrestrial reference frame, you need to know the distance between as many points as possible. Two methods help achieve that goal. Very-long baseline interferometry uses multiple radio antennas to monitor the signal from something very far away in space, like a quasar. The distance between the antennas can be calculated based on tiny changes in the time it takes the signal to reach them. Satellite laser ranging, the second method, bounces lasers off of satellites and measures the two-way travel time to calculate distance between ground stations.

Weiss and his colleagues would like to add a third method into the mix—GPS. At the moment, GPS measurements are used only to tie together the points created by very long baseline interferometry and satellite laser ranging together, not to directly calculate a terrestrial reference frame.

“There hasn’t been a whole lot of serious effort to include GPS directly,” says Weiss. His goal is to show that GPS can be used to create a terrestrial reference frame on its own. “The thing about GPS that’s different from very-long baseline interferometry and satellite laser ranging is that you don’t need complex and expensive infrastructure and can deploy many stations all around the world.”

Feeding GPS data directly into the calculation of a terrestrial reference frame could lead to an even more accurate and cost effective way to reference points geospatially. This could be good news for missions like Jason 2. Slight errors in the terrestrial reference frame can create significant errors where precise measurements are required. GPS stations could prove to be a vital and untapped resource in the quest to create the most accurate terrestrial reference frame possible. “The thing about GPS,” says Weiss, “is that you are just so data rich when compared to these other techniques.”

You can learn more about NASA’s efforts to create an accurate terrestrial reference frame here: http://http://space-geodesy.nasa.gov/.

Kids can learn all about GPS by visiting http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/gps and watching a fun animation about finding pizza here: http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/gps-pizza.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Caption: Artist’s interpretation of the Jason 2 satellite. To do its job properly, satellites like Jason 2 require as accurate a terrestrial reference frame as possible. Image courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

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A Two-Toned Wonder from the Saturnian Outskirts

By Dr. Ethan Siegel

Although Saturn has been known as long as humans have been watching the night sky, it's only since the invention of the telescope that we've learned about the rings and moons of this giant, gaseous world. You might know that the largest of Saturn's moons is Titan, the second largest moon in the entire Solar System, discovered by Christiaan Huygens in 1655. It was just 16 years later, in 1671, that Giovanni Cassini (for whom the famed division in Saturn's rings—and the NASA mission now in orbit there—is named) discovered the second of Saturn's moons: Iapetus. Unlike Titan, Iapetus could only be seen when it was on the west side of Saturn, leading Cassini to correctly conclude that not only was Iapetus tidally locked to Saturn, but that its trailing hemisphere was intrinsically brighter than its darker, leading hemisphere. This has very much been confirmed in modern times!

In fact, the darkness of the leading side is comparable to coal, while the rest of Iapetus is as white as thick sea ice. Iapetus is the most distant of all of Saturn's large moons, with an average orbital distance of 3.5 million km, but the culprit of the mysterious dark side is four times as distant: Saturn's remote, captured moon, the dark, heavily cratered Phoebe!

Orbiting Saturn in retrograde, or the opposite direction to Saturn's rotation and most of its other Moons, Phoebe most probably originated in the Kuiper Belt, migrating inwards and eventually succumbing to gravitational capture. Due to its orbit, Phoebe is constantly bombarded by micrometeoroid-sized (and larger) objects, responsible for not only its dented and cavity-riddled surface, but also for a huge, diffuse ring of dust grains spanning quadrillions of cubic kilometers! The presence of the "Phoebe Ring" was only discovered in 2009, by NASA's infrared-sensitive Spitzer Space Telescope. As the Phoebe Ring's dust grains absorb and re-emit solar radiation, they spiral inwards towards Saturn, where they smash into Iapetus—orbiting in the opposite direction—like bugs on a highway windshield. Was the dark, leading edge of Iapetus due to it being plastered with material from Phoebe? Did those impacts erode the bright surface layer away, revealing a darker substrate?

In reality, the dark particles picked up by Iapetus aren't enough to explain the incredible brightness differences alone, but they absorb and retain just enough extra heat from the Sun during Iapetus' day to sublimate the ice around it, which resolidifies preferentially on the trailing side, lightening it even further. So it's not just a thin, dark layer from an alien moon that turns Iapetus dark; it's the fact that surface ice sublimates and can no longer reform atop the leading side that darkens it so severely over time. And that story—only confirmed by observations in the last few years—is the reason for the one-of-a-kind appearance of Saturn's incredible two-toned moon, Iapetus!

Learn more about Iapetus here: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/science/moons/iapetus.

Kids can learn more about Saturn’s rings at NASA’s Space Place: http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/saturn-rings.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Caption: Saturn & the Phoebe Ring (middle). Images credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Keck; Iapetus (top left) - NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute/Cassini Imaging Team; Phoebe (bottom right) - NASA/ESA/JPL/Space Science Institute/Cassini Imaging Team.

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Surprising Young Stars in the Oldest Places in the Universe

By Dr. Ethan Siegel

Littered among the stars in our night sky are the famed deep-sky objects. These range from extended spiral and elliptical galaxies millions or even billions of light years away to the star clusters, nebulae, and stellar remnants strewn throughout our own galaxy. But there's an intermediate class of objects, too: the globular star clusters, self-contained clusters of stars found in spherically-distributed halos around each galaxy.

Back before there were any stars or galaxies in the universe, it was an expanding, cooling sea of matter and radiation containing regions where the matter was slightly more dense in some places than others. While gravity worked to pull more and more matter into these places, the pressure from radiation pushed back, preventing the gravitational collapse of gas clouds below a certain mass. In the young universe, this meant no clouds smaller than around a few hundred thousand times the mass of our Sun could collapse. This coincides with a globular cluster's typical mass, and their stars are some of the oldest in the universe!

These compact, spherical collections of stars are all less than 100 light-years in radius, but typically have around 100,000 stars inside them, making them nearly 100 times denser than our neighborhood of the Milky Way! The vast majority of globular clusters have extremely few heavy elements (heavier than helium), as little as 1% of what we find in our Sun. There's a good reason for this: our Sun is only 4.5 billion years old and has seen many generations of stars live-and-die, while globular clusters (and the stars inside of them) are often over 13 billion years old, or more than 90% the age of the universe! When you look inside one of these cosmic collections, you're looking at some of the oldest stellar swarms in the known universe.

Yet when you look at a high-resolution image of these relics from the early universe, you'll find a sprinkling of hot, massive, apparently young blue stars! Is there a stellar fountain of youth inside? Kind of! These massive stellar swarms are so dense -- especially towards the center -- that mergers, mass siphoning and collisions between stars are quite common. When two long-lived, low-mass stars interact in these ways, they produce a hotter, bluer star that will be much shorter lived, known as a blue straggler star. First discovered by Allan Sandage in 1953, these young-looking stars arise thanks to stellar cannibalism. So enjoy the brightest and bluest stars in these globular clusters, found right alongside the oldest known stars in the universe!

Learn about a recent globular cluster discovery here: http://www.nasa.gov/press/2013/september/hubble-uncovers-largest-known-group-of-star-clusters-clues-to-dark-matter.gov.

Kids can learn more about how stars work by listening to The Space Place’s own Dr. Marc: http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/podcasts/en/#stars.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Caption: Globular Cluster NGC 6397. Credit: ESA & Francesco Ferraro (Bologna Astronomical Observatory)/NASA, Hubble Space Telescope, WFPC2.

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