Space In General

...from today's edition of space weather.com comes news of a rare X-class solar flare.

MAJOR X-CLASS SOLAR FLARE: On Sept. 6th at 1202 UT, sunspot AR2673 unleashed a major X9.3-class solar flare--the strongest solar flare in more than a decade. X-rays and UV radiation from the blast ionized the top of Earth's atmosphere, causing a strong shortwave radio blackout over Europe, Africa and the Atlantic Ocean: blackout map.

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Above: The extreme UV flash from today's X9-class flare. Credit: Solar Dynamics Observatory

The explosion also produced a CME, shown here in a movie from NASA's STEREO-A spacecraft. (The fast moving star-like object in the STEREO-A movie is the planet Mercury.) NOAA analysts are still modeling the trajectory of the CME to determine whether or not it is Earth-directed.

Many readers are asking about the historic context of this event. How epic is it? Answer: This is a decade-class flare. A list of the most powerful solar flaresrecorded since 1976 ranks today's flare at #14, tied with a similar explosion in 1990. Compared to the iconic Carrington Event of 1859, or even the more recent Halloween storms of 2003, this event is relatively mild. Modern power grids, telecommunications, and other sun sensitive technologies should weather the storm with little difficulty.

On the other hand, sky watchers could see some fantastic auroras before the week is over. And ham radio operators will surely be noticing strange propagation effects as the sun exerts its influence on our planet's ionosphere.Stay tuned for updates.

Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery

ONE. BIG. SUNSPOT. The source of today's major flare is huge sunspot AR2673, shown here in a Sept. 5th photo taken by amateur astronomer Philippe Tosi of Nîmes, France:



How big is AR2673? An image of Earth has been inserted for scale. The largest of AR2673's dark cores are as wide as our entire planet, and they are surrounded by dozens of smaller cores as big as continents. Amateur astronomers with safely-filtered solar telescopes will have no trouble seeing this behemoth.

Overarching the complex collection of spots is a tangled magnetic canopy that harbors energy for strong solar flares. NOAA forecasters estimate a 75% chance of M-flares and a 25% chance of X-flares on Sept. 6th. Stay tuned for more explosions... Free: Solar Flare Alerts
 
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The Heliophysics Summer School: 10 Years and Counting
http://news.spaceweather.com/the-heliophysics-summer-school-10-years-and-counting/
by Tony Phillips

Some institutions of cutting-edge learning are very old. Harvard: 380 years. Princeton: 270 years. Caltech: 125 years.

Others are a little younger.

This year, academicians around the world are celebrating the 10th anniversary of the “Heliophysics Summer School,” a fresh-faced academy that introduces the next generation of scientists to a field of study that, arguably, didn’t even exist when the new millennium began.

“Heliophysics is something new and exciting,” says Lika Guhathakurta of NASA Headquarters.

“It’s a leap across scientific boundaries,” says Karel Schrijver, formerly of the Lockheed Martin Solar & Astrophysics Laboratory.

“It is a blueprint for the Universe,” says Amitava Bhattacharjee, Professor of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University.

It begins with Helios, our sun. Of all the objects in the cosmos, the sun affects our planet most. It is the 900lb gorilla of the Solar System, shaping climate, weather, even life itself.

Earth and the sun are deeply and intricately connected, not only by simple rays of light and heat, but also by a complex web of electricity, magnetism, solar wind and extreme ultraviolet radiation. Lines of electrical current and magnetic force can sometimes be traced, without interruption, all the way from the ground beneath our feet to the base of seething sunspots 93 million miles away. Our planet and our star are, in a sense, one.

“Back in the early 2000s, NASA had a division called the ‘Sun-Earth connection,’ which recognized this link,” recalls Guhathakurta. ”When Mike Griffin became the NASA administrator in April of 2005, he asked us to come up with a one-word description of our division that captured both the holistic simplicity and the vast scope of the sun-Earth system. Ultimately it is Sun-Earth connection division director Dick Fisher who is credited with inventing the word ‘heliophysics’.”

Re-naming the “Sun-Earth connection” wasn’t just a marketing ploy, it signaled an authentic shift in thinking about stars and their relationships to planets, moons, asteroids and comets.

“Heliophysics is a unique science,” says George Siscoe of Boston University. “You can see this by realizing that all matter in the universe is organized macroscopically by two long-range forces: gravity and magnetism. As the saying goes, gravity sucks, hence the origin of dense objects like planets, stars, galaxies, etc. But magnetism repels, hence magnetospheres, solar storms, geomagnetic storms, and all large-scale magnetically organized structures in the universe. A very important part of heliophysics is made up of the structures that result when the pull of gravity and the push of magnetism compete.”

Once upon a time, the study of gravity and magnetism were separated by high academic walls. They had their own textbooks, their own course numbers, and their own professors who rarely talked shop together. Heliophysics breaks down these barriers—and many others.
 
Brazil daytime gigantic blue sprite, or jet. Weird.

This phenomenon has not been seen before in modern times, that I know of. There may be ancient depictions of such thing. I don't know what it means, or portends.

I can speculate that such a huge discharge could be related to the South Atlantic Anomaly, which is drifting increasingly over Brazil. This is a weakening of the Earth's magnetic field which allows the Van Allen belts to dip much closer to Earth, and the place where a global magnetic pole reversal may be most likely to commence. If so, this raises the grisly prospect of much more radiation bathing the surface if and when a magnetic reversal should ensue. It is not known how long it takes to complete a reversal and a full restoration of the field. Likely many years. Ugh!






A cross-sectional view of the Van Allen radiation belts, noting the point where the South Atlantic Anomaly occurs

- click to enlarge -
 
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Cassini's final photo before the dive:

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This monochrome view is the last image taken by the imaging cameras on NASA's Cassini spacecraft. It looks toward the planet's night side, lit by reflected light from the rings, and shows the location at which the spacecraft would enter the planet's atmosphere hours later.

A natural color view, created using images taken with red, green and blue spectral filters, is also provided (Figure B, right). The imaging cameras obtained this view at approximately the same time that Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer made its own observations of the impact area in the thermal infrared.

This location -- the site of Cassini's atmospheric entry -- was at this time on the night side of the planet, but would rotate into daylight by the time Cassini made its final dive into Saturn's upper atmosphere, ending its remarkable 13-year exploration of Saturn.

The view was acquired on Sept. 14, 2017 at 19:59 UTC (spacecraft event time). The view was taken in visible light using the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera at a distance of 394,000 miles (634,000 kilometers) from Saturn. Image scale is about 11 miles (17 kilometers).


 
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Cassini's final photo before the dive:
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I worked on that project for years, and worked with the main speakers in that video. It was a good project, and the end of an era as far as NASA goes. There won't be another mission like Cassini for a long time. It was done properly, with levels of redundancy and contingency planning that you just won't see in the smaller-budget missions that have come after it. It was the way a mission really ought to be run, fully staffed, well planned, and well executed. It was an absolutely polished product.

I have to say, it represents a major achievement in space exploration, and I'm lucky to have been a part of it.
 
So Elon Musk gave an update speech on his Mars plans tonight from the IAC conference in Australia. Basically went over their plans and what the capabilities of their future launch system will entail. I'll post that video when they upload it to YouTube, but here's something else that he threw out there as a possibility of the new launch system. Around the world travel. New York to Los Angeles in 25 minutes anyone?



Sure the guy is a big dreamer, but you have to start somewhere, right? By the way, the 9th anniversary of the Falcon 1 launch was today. They have come a long way in 9 years. Here's to the next decade...

Oh, and I bet 'BFR' stands for 'Big 🤬 Rocket'. :lol:
 
R1600Turbo
I'll post that video when they upload it to YouTube, but here's something else that he threw out there as a possibility of the new launch system. Around the world travel. New York to Los Angeles in 25 minutes anyone?
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I don't remember Musk spouting nonsense before. We don't need another concorde.
 
Thematic
I don't remember Musk spouting nonsense before. We don't need another concorde.
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Just another possibility, doubt it'll happen.

Here's the speech video. Just a heads up that he stutters a lot during the speech. I know he's not that great at giving speeches, but this one was a little harder to follow. Nerves? Too much info spinning in his head he had trouble getting it out? Who knows.

 
The major news is that Musk has given up on the Dragon capsule with propulsive landing, whether on the Moon, Mars, or anywhere. He may be undergoing some kind of crisis of confidence.
 
Dotini
The major news is that Musk has given up on the Dragon capsule with propulsive landing, whether on the Moon, Mars, or anywhere. He may be undergoing some kind of crisis of confidence.
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16 successful booster landings in a row might do that to you. ;)
 
R1600Turbo
So Elon Musk gave an update speech on his Mars plans tonight from the IAC conference in Australia. Basically went over their plans and what the capabilities of their future launch system will entail. I'll post that video when they upload it to YouTube, but here's something else that he threw out there as a possibility of the new launch system. Around the world travel. New York to Los Angeles in 25 minutes anyone?



Sure the guy is a big dreamer, but you have to start somewhere, right? By the way, the 9th anniversary of the Falcon 1 launch was today. They have come a long way in 9 years. Here's to the next decade...

Oh, and I bet 'BFR' stands for 'Big 🤬 Rocket'. :lol:
Click to expand...


Ok, a couple of comments on this. These are sub-orbital flights, so nowhere near as expensive as sending something to the space station. Right now, a flight to china in first class costs around $8k per person. That's 16 hours on the plane, trying to sleep, etc. It would be worth MORE than $8k for sure to get there in 30 min. How much more? Uh... hard to say, but more. Doing it in a chartered jet would cost a whole lot more per flight.

So the question becomes whether you can launch what... 10? 20? people sub-orbital from one part of the planet to another for what? $200k? $400k? But of course you have to do it twice, because they'll want a round-trip ticket.

It's not completely out of the question, but I don't think we're anywhere near that kind of price point yet. I also have no idea what people will pay to get to China in 30 min.
 
The other thing about suborbital is weightlessness. You launch, then you coast. How many barf bags will it need to carry, and who instinctively knows how to barf into the bag in weightlessness? Not the cabin experience that "first-class" travelers are expecting...
 
...from today's edition of space weather.com

MAJOR SPACE WEATHER EVENT ON MARS: More than 150 years after it happened, scientists are still taking about the Carrington Event—a solar storm in Sept. 1859 that sparked Northern Lights as far south as Cuba and sprayed the entire surface of Earth with high energy radiation.

On our planet, such global events are rare. On Mars, they happen surprisingly often—in fact, there was one just a few weeks ago.

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The storm began on Sept. 10, 2017--a day the sun was supposed to be quiet: The solar cycle is currently at low ebb, near Solar Minimum, and strong flares are rare. Nevertheless, sunspot AR2673 erupted, producing a powerful X8-class solar flare that accelerated a potent spray of charged particles into space.

In a matter of hours, a "ground level event" (GLE) was underway on Mars. GLEs occur when energetic particles normally held at bay by a planet's atmosphere or magnetic field penetrate all the way to the ground. Mars rover Curiosity detected the radiation spike as it crawled just south of the Martian equator.

"Radiation levels suddenly doubled and they remained high for nearly two days," says Don Hassler of the Southwest Research Institute, principal investigator for Curiosity's Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD). "This is the largest event we have seen since Curiosity landed in 2012."



Earth was in the line of fire, too, but our planet's magnetic field and thick atmosphere mitigated the effect of the storm. The terrestrial GLE on Sept. 10th was restricted to polar regions and amounted to a meager 6% increase–a tiny fraction of what happened on Mars.

Mars got walloped because, simply put, it is more vulnerable to space weather. The Red Planet has no global magnetic field to protect it, and an atmosphere only 1% as thick as Earth's. Energetic particles from the Sept. 10th explosion peppered the entire dayside surface of Mars while auroras fringed the upper atmosphere all around the globe.

NASA's MAVEN spacecraft saw the auroras using its ultraviolet imager. "If a human had been present, with eyes sensitive to visible light, they would have probably seen Mars lit up in green light (557.7nm) much like auroras on Earth," says Sonal Jain of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado.


Click to play a movie of the UV auroras on Mars

"Sonal had the excitement of being blown away when the raw data come in," says his colleague Nick Schneider, also of LASP. "The auroras were 25 times brighterthan the previous record." Both scientists work with MAVEN data and specialize in Martian auroras.

"These global events are really interesting," says Schneider. "On Earth It takes a truly extreme solar storm to cause global havoc thanks to the strength of our magnetic field. Mars' lack of a global magnetic field means that planet-wide events are far more common. Indeed, since MAVEN went into Mars-orbit 3 years ago, we've seen a bunch of auroral displays that were probably global, even though this has been a really wimpy solar cycle."

Hassler agrees. "Curiosity has seen 5 ground level events since 2012. They are not uncommon," he says, "and they will probably grow stronger in the years ahead as we move through Solar Minimum and return to a more active phase of the solar cycle."

Planners of future human missions to Mars will have to take into account the frequency of these "Martian Carrington Events," increasingly revealed by rovers and orbiters of the Red Planet. Meanwhile, researchers are still poring over data from the latest, hoping to learn more. "Analysis of these observations, both at Mars and Earth, is just beginning," says Hassler, "so stay tuned." Free: Aurora Alerts
 
Dotini
Ultimately it is Sun-Earth connection division director Dick Fisher who is credited with inventing the word ‘heliophysics’.”
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The word has been around much longer, he's in fact credited with extending the definition from purely sunbound activity to its outer interfaces.
 
MAGNETIC UNREST IN ENGLAND: In England, magnetic fields at ground level have been shaking back and forth in response to the solar wind. Stuart Green's backyard magnetometer in Preston, UK, shows the geomagnetic storm in action:



"It's always wonderful to see the impact of a geomagnetic storm on my magnetometer here in the UK," says Green. "The chart clearly shows the arrival of a high-speed solar wind stream on Oct. 11th. Magnetic unrest intensified over the following 24hrs to create a G1-class geomagnetic storm."

The squiggles in Green's chart represent changes in the local magnetic field caused by the buffeting of solar wind high overhead. "The sensor is buried in my garden about 0.5 meters below the surface in an East/West orientation," he explains. "This allows very sensitive (sub nanotesla) measurements of magnetic declination during geomagnetic storms. The plot shows the change in magnetic flux density in nanotesla occurring between readings every few minutes."

^From today's edition of spaceweather.com
 

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