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Hetken aikaa tuo purkaus on isompi kuin meidän aurinko. Maata kohtaava X-luokan CME on vain ajan kysymys.
Other space telescopes such as the ESA/NASA SOHO satellite frequently see solar activity like this, but either closer to the Sun, or further out by means of an occulter, which blocks out the glare of the Sun’s disc to enable detailed imagery of the corona itself. Thus, the prominence observed by Solar Orbiter is the largest ever event of its kind to be captured in a single field of view together with the solar disc, opening up new possibilities to see how events like these connect to the solar disc for the first time. At the same time, SOHO can provide complementary views to even larger distances.
Even spacecraft not dedicated to solar science felt its blast – the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission, currently in the vicinity of Mercury’s orbit – detected a massive increase in the readings for electrons, protons, and heavy ions with its radiation monitor.
And while this event did not send a blast of deadly particles towards Earth, it is an important reminder of the unpredictable nature of the Sun and the importance of understanding and monitoring its behaviour. Together with ESA’s future dedicated space weather mission Vigil, which will provide unique views of events like these, we can better protect our home planet from the Sun’s violent outbursts.
EMP suojaus riippuu materiaalista ja sen paksuudesta. Tulee tallista aika kallis. Toisaalta, kunhan se on metallihäkki, missä ei ole reikiä, niin se voi olla riittävä vaimennus monella asialle. Ei absoluuttinen mutta auttava.autotalliin EMP suojaus
Fast radio bursts were an enigma when they were first spotted. At first, each FRB followed the same pattern: a huge surge of energy in radio wavelengths that lasted less than a second—and then the burst was gone, never to repeat. We initially suspected FRBs might be hardware glitches in our detectors, but over time, the bursts' recurrence convinced us that they were real.
Since then, we've identified sources of repeated bursts and associated the FRBs with a source that produces energy outside the radio range. This ultimately helped us point the finger at a single source: magnetars, or neutron stars that have extremely intense magnetic fields.
Now, reality has gone and thrown a monkey wrench in that nice and simple explanation. A new repeating source of FRBs has been identified, and it resides in a location where we wouldn't expect to find any magnetars. This doesn't mean that the source isn't from a magnetar, but we have to resort to some unusual explanations for its formation.
Russia is suspending space launches from French Guiana and withdrawing its technical personnel in response to EU sanctions over Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, the space agency said Saturday.
"In response to EU sanctions against our enterprises, Roskosmos is suspending cooperation with European partners over organising space launches from the Kourou cosmodrome and withdrawing its technical personnel... from French Guiana," Dmitry Rogozin, chief of the Russian space agency, said on messaging app Telegram.
There are currently 87 Russian nationals in French Guiana, the agency said.
The next Soyuz launch from Kourou was scheduled for 6 April. An agreement between the European Space Agency and Russia on the use of launchers was signed in 2005. It enabled the Russian Soyuz launchers to use Europe's spaceport in French Guiana as a launch base. Soyuz lifted off for the first time from the spaceport in French Guiana in 2011.
On Thursday, Russian leader Vladimir Putin unleashed a full-scale invasion of pro-Western Ukraine that has killed dozens of people, forced more than 50,000 to flee Ukraine in just 48 hours and sparked fears of a greater conflict in Europe.
The assault has prompted a wave of new Western sanctions against Russia including an export ban that targets the defence and aerospace sectors.
No, vastahan rys... venäläiset aiheuttivat asemalla kaaoksen, kun juuri telakoitunut alus avasi vahingossa moottorinsa "hieman" liian isolle. Taisi asema lopulta pyörähtää kertaalleen ympäri. Tuommoiset töppäykset rasittavat aseman liitoskohta aivan turhaan.
Venäjän avaruusjärjestön Roscosmosin johtaja Dmitry Rogozin kommentoi jyrkkäsanaisesti Yhdysvaltojen tiukempaa linjaa. "Haluatko tuhota yhteistyömme Kansainvälisellä avaruusasemalla", Rogozin kirjotti twitterissä.
"Jos estät yhteistyön kanssamme, kuka pelastaa Kansainvälisen avaruusaseman hallitsemattoman putoamisen Yhdysvaltoihin tai Eurooppaan? On myös optio pudottaa 500-tonnin rakennelma Intiaan ja Kiinaan. Haluatko uhata heitä sellaisella mahdollisuudella. Asema ei lennä Venäjän yli, joten kaikki riskit ovat teidän. Oletteko valmiita niihin."
Viimeksi mainittu väite on hämmästyttävä. Rogozin varmastikin on perillä siitä, että ISS lentää myös Venäjän yli. Juuri tämä mahdollistaa aseman kosmonauttien yhteydenpidon itänaapurin lennonjohdon kanssa.
Today, NASA shared an image indicating that the agency had successfully completed the image-alignment stage of commissioning the James Webb Space Telescope. The Webb's primary mirror is composed of 18 individual segments, and, as of today's update, all of those segments are aligned so that a single star shows up as a single object. While several more focusing steps are still required, the path to commissioning the telescope keeps getting shorter.
Immediately after launch, NASA's attention was on unfolding all the pieces of the telescope that had to be held in a compact configuration to fit inside the launch vehicle. This process included reorienting and extending the primary mirror, lowering the secondary mirror into place, and stretching out the multilayered sunscreen that helps keep the imaging hardware cold.
To the surprise and delight of many people, all that unfolding went incredibly smoothly. Since then, the focus has shifted to... well, focus. The Webb's primary mirror consists of 18 separate mirrors in a hexagonal array, each of which can be controlled separately. When the primary mirror was first unfolded, the separate mirrors reflected 18 individual smears scattered across the secondary mirror.
Earlier this month, however, tweaks to the mirrors created a hexagonal array of smears that replicated the arrangement of the primary mirror segments. Today's announcement saw the segments shifted so that each of the smears was partly focused and moved to the center of the secondary mirror. The result? The star that's being imaged for this process is now a single dot at the center of the telescope's field of view.
NASA isn't done just yet, however. Although all the images are in the same place, they're simply superimposed there. The ultimate goal is to have the segments behave as a single mirror, which requires more careful focusing. To do so, engineers will image the spectra of the light, looking for slight shifts of the image locations at different wavelengths. From that, it's possible to figure out which way the mirrors must be shifted to fine-tune the mirror segments.
sorsa spaceweather.comWhen a volcano exploded out of the Pacific Ocean near Tonga on Jan. 15th, scientists immediately realized they were witnessing something special. Little did they know how special. A new analysis of images from Earth-orbiting satellites shows that the plume punched a hole in our atmosphere all the way up to the mesosphere.
Bedka and colleagues combined images from two satellites: NOAA's GOES-17 and Japan's Himawari-8, both of which observed the eruption using similar infrared cameras from different points in geosynchronous orbit. Using the simple math of stereo geometry, the team calculated that the plume rose to 58 kilometers (36 miles) at its highest point.
For comparison, the largest known volcanic plume in the satellite era before Tonga came from Mount Pinatubo, which spewed ash and aerosols up to 35 kilometers (22 miles) into the air above the Philippines in 1991. The Tonga plume was 1.5 times the height of Pinatubo.
The extreme height of the Tonga plume means it could affect space weather phenomena such as sprites, airglow, and noctilucent clouds, which also occur in the mesosphere. Tonga was truly out of this world.
NASA Inspector General Paul Martin serves as an independent watchdog for the space agency's myriad activities. For nearly the entirety of his time as inspector general, since his appointment in 2009, Martin has tracked NASA's development of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft.
Although his office has issued a dozen reports or so on various aspects of these programs, he has never succinctly stated his thoughts about the programs—until Tuesday.
Appearing before a House Science Committee hearing on NASA's Artemis program, Martin revealed the operational costs of the big rocket and spacecraft for the first time. Moreover, he took aim at NASA and particularly its large aerospace contractors for their "very poor" performance in developing these vehicles.
Martin said that the operational costs alone for a single Artemis launch—for just the rocket, Orion spacecraft, and ground systems—will total $4.1 billion. This is, he said, "a price tag that strikes us as unsustainable." With this comment, Martin essentially threw down his gauntlet and said NASA cannot have a meaningful exploration program based around SLS and Orion at this cost.
Something big just happened on the sun. Solar physicists Scott McIntosh (NCAR) and Bob Leamon (U. Maryland-Baltimore County) call it “The Termination Event.”
“Old Solar Cycle 24 has finally died–it was terminated!” says McIntosh. “Now the new solar cycle, Solar Cycle 25, can really take off.”
The “Termination Event” is a new idea in solar physics, outlined by McIntosh and Leamon in a December 2020 paper in the journal Solar Physics. Not everyone accepts it–yet. If Solar Cycle 25 unfolds as McIntosh and Leamon predict, the Termination Event will have to be taken seriously.
The basic idea is this: Solar Cycle 25 (SC25) started in Dec. 2019. However, old Solar Cycle 24 (SC24) refused to go away. It hung on for two more years, producing occasional old-cycle sunspots and clogging the sun’s upper layers with its decaying magnetic field. During this time, the two cycles coexisted, SC25 struggling to break free while old SC24 held it back.
“Solar Cycle 24 was cramping Solar Cycle 25’s style,” says Leamon.
Researchers have long known that solar cycles can overlap. The twist added by McIntosh and Leamon is the realization that overlapping cycles interact. This makes sense. In the early 20th century, George Ellery Hale discovered that the magnetic polarity of sunspot pairs reverses itself from one cycle to the next; indeed, the sun’s entire global magnetic field flips every ~11 years. When adjacent, opposite-polarity solar cycles overlap, they naturally interfere.
Termination Events mark the end of interference, when a new cycle can break free of the old.
“We found that the longer the time between terminators, the weaker the next cycle would be,” explains Leamon. “Conversely, the shorter the time between terminators, the stronger the next solar cycle would be.”