Solar flare captured in stunning NASA video
By Melissa Goldin From Mashable
A NASA video released recently features striking footage of a mid-level solar flare recently captured by the space agency’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.
Solar flares are large bursts of radiation that manifest themselves as a moment of sudden brightness over the sun’s surface.
The video highlights an M-class flare with an intensity level of 6.5 — much stronger than an M1 flare, the weakest of the group. The X-class, which is the most intense flare, is 10 times more powerful than the M-Class.
No one on Earth can be physically affected by solar flares, as their emissions cannot pass through Earth’s atmosphere. The only thing we’d have to worry about is communication: If a flare is intense enough, it can impact the layer of the atmosphere in which GPS and communications signals exist.
Peaking at 10:05 a.m. ET on Wednesday, the flare is shown “in a blend of two wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light: 131 Angstroms and 171 Angstroms,” according to NASA. The wavelengths are colorized in yellow and red at different points during the video.
Check out the breathtaking sequence in the clip by going to the story link below.
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IMAGES: NASA
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NASA starts building asteroid-bound spacecraft
By Colin Daileda From Mashable
NASA gave the go-ahead to start construction of the first asteroid-bound spacecraft on Wednesday, which is scheduled to launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida during the Fall of 2016.
OSIRIS-REx will land on an asteroid named Bennu, which comes close to Earth in 2018. The spacecraft will spend a year exploring the asteroid, and will bring about two ounces of soil samples back to Earth.
Dante Lauretta, a planetary science professor at the University of Arizona who is serving as principal investigator for the mission, told Mashable that there has already been a decade’s worth of planning just to get to the point where they were ready to build the spacecraft, and that the timeline from here on out is “perfect.”
Part of that planning involved selecting the best asteroid. “There’s something like 700,000 asteroids in the solar system,” Lauretta said, “and we had to pick one to send a spacecraft to.”
First, the team eliminated asteroids that were too far away to be practical. That got the number down to a few hundred. Then, they looked at the size. The team wants the craft to have room to roam, and smaller asteroids spin so quickly that a landing would be almost impossible, so they looked at asteroids with a 200-meter diameter.
The science team told Lauretta and company that they were also searching for a carbon-rich space rock that might be able to help them understand how an asteroid could have given rise to life on Earth. That led them to Bennu.
The asteroid is on the opposite side of the sun right now, but its orbit takes about 1.2 years — meaning it crosses Earth’s orbit once every six years. Bennu actually has a 0.0005% chance of hitting our planet in 2018, according to Lauretta.
That might seem like a minuscule number, but it’s a lot closer than the vast majority of asteroids in our solar system ever get.
The mission is meant to help NASA better understand asteroids, and to help determine which ones might be suitable for future landings. “The initiative brings together the best of NASA’s science, technology and human exploration efforts to achieve President Obama’s goal of sending humans to an asteroid by 2025,” the space agency says.
If the schedule doesn’t run into any hiccups, OSIRIS-REx should be back on Earth by 2023. Parts of the spacecraft are being constructed in different areas of the U.S., from Greenbelt, Md., to Tucson, Ariz.
PHOTO: An artist’s impression of the asteroid mission OSIRIS-REx. IMAGE: NASA/GODDARD
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