Cygnus Supply Craft. Sporting New Solar Array

Cygnus's newest improvements are effective, efficient and by many descriptions - adorable.

When the S.S. Deke Slayton II launched in December, it was the first mission of the
newly-upgraded Cygnus spacecraft.

The upgrades included an expanded cargo hold and reworked service module, but most striking of all is the new solar panels. Like the rectangular bars on every other spacecraft (including older-model Cygnus spacecraft), the Cygnus now sports a pair of round Ultraflex solar arrays.

The design is not form alone however. The round fan-fold allows for higher performance at a lower mass than typical arrays. The arrays also fold up smaller than traditional arrays, reducing the stowage volume  when launching. 

Check out the Gizmodo article HERE

WTF?!! Solar Power Would Suck Up All The Power?

I usually don't do Earth sciences as for the most part they are not my forte so to speak. But sometime not saying anything is paramount to agreeing or supporting crackpot ideas.   For example....

A recent town meeting in Woodland North Carolina heard comments on a proposed solar energy plant.

What was surprising was the number of people who spoke out against the solar farm including a retired science teacher named Jane Mann.  One of Mz Mann's  concerns was that the array would suck up all the sun energy leaving none for the plants to conduct photosynthesis. Also she was concerned about the  jump in cancer deaths in the area, might be attributed to the solar power plant.  

Bobby Mann also agreed but went on to say that with the solar farm sucking up all the energy, new businesses would be disinclined to locate in Woodland.  The array would kill the town and young people would then move away.  

I am sorry, I don't even have to try, this stuff  writes itself!

for the original Boing Boing article, click HERE

Unique photos of the march Full Solar Eclipse

Wow, now this is what I call an eclipse photo! 

In the Arctic's Svalbard islands  Solar Wind researchers from the University of Hawaii at Manoa  sat up camp in March, in hopes of capturing images of the Sun's corona, or that aura of plasma surrounding the sun.

This close up photo is a composite of 29 separate shots.

Link to Gizmodo article

The Solar System Was Probablly Never a Steady State

 Despite what a lot of solar system pundits would like to believe, Sol's children have not always played nice nor stayed in there own back yards. Jupiter, for instance, may have once been as close to the Sun as Mars is now!

During the formation of the solar system, the gaseous giant planets that make up the outer solar system were pulled much closer to the Sun than they are now, causing absolute chaos in the asteroid belt.

As the gas giants did their dance through the solar system, the planets, from Mercury to Neptune may have been pulled into the asteroid belt. Jupiter most likely caused the most chaos in the asteroid belt by sweeping up all but one tenth of a percent behind.

All of this disruption wasn't a bad thing however. It has long been believed that Earth's water came from asteroid ice. Very likely it was the massive stirring that Jupiter caused brought the material to Earth that was the starting point for complex life.

 View the Daily Galaxy blog for the original HERE

Moon Based Solar Cells Could Power the Earth

An article on Dvice reports on a truly originally inventive idea from Shimizu Corp.  to build an array of solar cells will extend along the entire 6,8353 mile lunar equator. This belt will eventually grow  to a width of  249 miles in width. 

Construction would be left to construction robots who wold be shipped to the Moon along with the supplies needed to construct the  array. Once installed, the Sun-facing cells would collect energy and store it until they were facing the Earth once more. Then laser and microwave transmitters would fire up, beaming power to their partner stations around the globe.

The microwave antennas on the Moon would be 12 miles in diameter augmented with high density laser transmitter 


Shimizu Corp's Plan

 DVice article on the solar project

First Time Photograph of Comet Hitting the Sun

Tim Sayell sends in this great link from Yahoo News detailing the first time ever photograph of a comet striking the sun!

The picture was taken July 6 by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, a satellite launched on February 11, 2010 who's mission is to observe the Sun for over five years.

From the article:

• One of the SDO spacecraft's high-definition imagers "actually spotted a sun-grazing comet as it disintegrated over about a 15 minute period, something never observed before.....
• The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, a joint NASA-European Space Agency spacecraft, also spotted the comet's demise and recorded a video of the event.

Read the full article here

Oh where have all the sunspots gone? ***updated***

Shaun Saunders sends in an article from Science Daily that answers a question that has troubled astronomers for some time. For the past 2 years sunspots have been been a very rare event. The lack was at first difficult to lock down. Sunspot activity goes through an 11 year cycle and therefor the sun was already at a low activity point. But the decrease in activity was so deep and lasting for so long that there was speculation that the solar minimum might be entering a century long phase with virtually no activity that hasn't happened since the 17th century.

According to the article:

• researchers announced that a jet stream deep inside the sun is migrating slower than usual through the star's interior, giving rise to the current lack of sunspots.

These jet streams (which in fact move 7 thousand miles below the surface of the sun) start at the poles and move down to the equator, which when reached, supports new sunspot activity, and a new jet stream is started at the pole. This migration takes 11 years or about 2 years per 10 degrees of angle. What has happened recently though is the migration is taking nearer 3 years to move down 10 degrees. The good news is that even though they are slower, the present jet stream will reach the equator which means there should be a return to normal solar activity.

Read the complete Science Digest article

Update: Tim sends in an update from Yahooo News.
It seems after a protracted absence of sun-spot activity, there has been a resurgence in the past week (July 2009) this after one of the longest period of no activity in modern history. Prior to this low point - scientist were looking for the next peak of activity in 2013 to be one of the most energetic, however after this quite period the next peak of solar flare activity is estimated to be very modest. This may turn out to be very good news indeed. Had the next high point been as bad as was being predicted, it is estimated that there could have been upwards of $2 trillion in initial damages by crippling communications on Earth, by damaging satellites in orbit and sensitive electronic equipment on the ground.

read the yahoo article here

Is the Sun Dead?

The Daily Galaxy blog sports an article concerning a disquieting lack of activity on the surface of the sun. Sunspots are a well documented phenomena in the upper atmosphere of Sol. Periods of inactivity are common. What isn't common is the amount of time that has passed since a spot was last seen. As Daily Galaxy puts it: ...they are all gone. Not even solar physicists know why it’s happening and what this odd solar silence might be indicating for our future. Although periods of inactivity are normal for the sun, this current period has gone on much longer than usual and scientists are starting to worry—at least a little bit. Today's sun is as inactive as it was two years ago, and solar physicists don’t have a clue as to why.

Dana Longcope, a solar physicist at MSU, said the sun usually operates on an 11-year cycle with maximum activity occurring in the middle of the cycle. The last cycle reached its peak in 2001 and is believed to be just ending now, Longcope said. The next cycle is just beginning and is expected to reach its peak sometime around 2012. But so far nothing is happening. In the past, scientists observed that the sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots. That period coincided with a little ice age on Earth that lasted from 1650 to 1700. Evidence for abrupt climate change is readily found in ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica. One of the best known examples of such an event is the Younger Dryas cooling, which occurred about 12,000 years ago, named after the arctic wildflower found in northern European sediments. This event began and ended rather abruptly, and for its entire 1000 year duration the North Atlantic region was about 5°C colder.

As some have pointed out the Younger Dryas cooling happened when the Earth should have been WARMING up instead of experiencing a mini iceage.

Ulysses, ends a 17 year mission

After more than 17 years exploring the effects of solar activity, the Ulysses mission is now approaching its end. Ulysses, a ESA/NASA mission, was launched in October 1990. Its' mission was to explore the regions above and below the Sun’s poles - and study our star’s sphere of influence, or heliosphere. Originally designed for a lifetime of five years, the mission has surpassed all expectations. Scientists will be studying the reams of data Ulysses has returned for years to come.

Wikipedia info onUlysses

Vibrations on the Sun may 'shake' the Earth

What do dropped mobile phone calls, mysterious signals in undersea communications cables, and tiny tremors on the Earth have in common? They are all caused by vibrations on the Sun, according to one team of scientists. Churning motions inside the Sun produce various kinds of waves, similar to the rise and fall of waves on the surface of the ocean. These waves have periods of several minutes to several hours. In the mid-1990s, a team of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, scientists reported seeing fluctuations in the solar wind with periods in the same range. The researchers suggested that the solar vibrations were somehow imprinting onto the solar wind to produce the regular fluctuations. Now, Thomson's team says it has evidence that these modes not only travel through space in the solar wind, but also influence natural phenomena and human technologies on Earth.

NASA puts on 3-D glasses to view sun

NASA released the first three-dimensional images of the sun, saying the photos taken from twin spacecraft may lead to better predictions of solar eruptions that can affect communications and power lines on Earth. The images from the STEREO spacecraft (for Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) are available on the Internet. (Put your 3-D glasses on and take a look) The twin spacecraft, launched in October, are orbiting the sun, one slightly ahead of the Earth and one behind. The separation, just like the distance between our two eyes, provides the depth perception that allows the 3-D images to be obtained. That depth perception is also particularly helpful for studying a type of solar eruption called a coronal mass ejection. Along with overloading power lines and disrupting satellite communications, the eruptions can endanger astronauts on spacewalks. The eruptions -- also called solar flares -- typically blow a billion tons of the sun's atmosphere into space at a speed of 1 million miles per hour. Besides power and communications problems, the phenomenon is responsible for the northern lights, or aurora borealis, the luminous display of lights seen in the upper latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.

submitted by Shaun A. Saunders

Robotic Fleas Spring into Action

A robotic flea has been developed that is capable of jumping nearly 30 times its height, rubber band power. These tiny rubber band powered micro-robots could serve as ultra-small sensors. Swarms of such robots could eventually be used to create networks of distributed sensors for detecting chemicals or for military-surveillance purposes. Early tests show that the solar-powered autonomous "flea-bots" can store enough energy to make a 7-millimeter robot jump 200 millimeters high. This flea-like ballistic jumping would enable these sensors to be mobile, overcoming distances and obstacles that would normally be a major problem for micrometer-sized bots.

Scientists Predict Big Solar Cycle

Shaun A. Saunders brought this to my attention. (Oh he also said "shades of Curtain Call" for readers info Curtain Call was read on BMU show 34 that's the 12/30/06 show, I am inclined to agree though there is another story called "Last Light that I think works with this one too. Look for "Last Light in the coming weeks on BMU)

Evidence is mounting: the next solar cycle is going to be a big one. Solar cycle 24, due to peak in 2010 or 2011 "looks like its going to be one of the most intense cycles since record-keeping began almost 400 years ago," says solar physicist David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center. He and colleague Robert Wilson presented this conclusion last week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.