RenoVous

  Perhaps you saw some aurora this week, thanks to a solar storm. But that caused a delay for the new Mars Mission launch, the Blue Origin New Glenn rocket. It was scheduled for November 12, but was able to go up yesterday instead.  It was originally supposed to launch in October of 2024, but a series of technical and scheduling issues brought us to November 2025. All this is for the ESCAPADE spacecraft - Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers - and it is meant to study the exact kind of space weather that delayed it. As the sun releases large clouds of plasma, known as coronal mass ejections, the electricity charged material triggers auroras when the particles interact with Earth's magnetic field lines and atmosphere. ESCAPADE will examine how this weather, as well as solar wind, previously stripped Mars of the thicker atmosphere the planet used to have.   Mission

  In May of this year, NASA tracked the most intense solar storm in decades.  The Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded 82 notable solar flares. This video highlights flares classified at M5 or higher, with nine categorized as X-class - the most powerful being an X8.7 flare, recorded May 14. This video shows a solar storm messing with Rover's camera on Mars. While auroras are beautiful, they can signal danger as well.  Scientists have been working to identify when these storms can cause the most devastation, and new research emphasizes the influence of the angle at which an irregularity in the solar wind arrives. Most often we are hit at a substantial enough angle to produce a glancing blow, but more direct hits create the strongest currents (above 20 amps) in long stretches of conducting material.  In this day and age, with our powerlines and pipelines, this can be worrisome. In Mantsala, Finland a gas pipeline received 332 shocks between 1999 and 2023.  The resu...

  Monday, April 8th! Here  you can enter your location for viewing and time. On my end, we'll get 35.7% coverage at 11:19am. NASA will have a live broadcast. Remember your safety precautions - and if you're in an area of totality, I see a lot of headlines about preparing for the crowds of visitors.  Texas has even deployed their National Guard, "a proactive step towards ensuring a successful and incident-free event."

You may recall back in January , we looked at some amazing images of our Sun. Now we have the first images from Solar Orbiter. The closest image taken of the sun so far shows tiny flares, dubbed "campfires." Solar Orbiter captured these images in extreme ultraviolet wavelengths of light. It is believed that these "campfires" help explain why the corona, the sun's outer atmosphere, is millions of degrees hotter than the solar surface.  They are thought to be smaller versions of solar flares, powerful magnetic outbursts that shoot radiation into space. Solar Orbiter launched February 9.  The images were taken May 30 from a position 77 million kilometers from the sun, about half the distance from Earth. Ultimately it will approach 42 million kilometers away, and will be the first spacecraft to fly over the solar poles. Science News ESA

The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope has produced the highest resolution image of the sun's surface. The cell-like structures, which contain boiling plasma and are each about the size of Texas, are the signature of violent motions that transport heat from the inside of the sun to the surface.  Hot solar material rises in the bright centers, cools off, and then sinks below the surface in dark lanes in a process known as convection. In the dark lanes, we can also see the tiny bright markers of magnetic fields.  These spots might be why the corona (outer layers of the solar atmosphere) is more than a million degrees. The motions of the plasma twist and tangle the magnetic fields which leads to solar storms.  The more we can learn about this space weather, the more prepared we can be for potentially harmful solar activity. On the summit of Haleakala in Maui, Hawaii. The National Science Foundation here will be studying the sun and space weather ...