Archive for the ‘Earth’ Category

From an altitude of 218 miles (350 km) the cameras aboard the International Space Station look back at our planet as Hurricane Earl passes underneath as a Category 4 storm northeast of Puerto Rico near the northern Antilles islands. The Russian Progress 37 cargo craft and the Soyuz TMA-18 spacecraft in the foreground.

NASA’s Chief scientist of Goddard Space Flight Center, Dr. Jim Garvin explains why exploring the inner solar system is important gives us a better understanding of the history and future of such exploration. Video is from last month, the 14th of July and was filmed in front of an audience of summer interns and co-op students.

The DigitalGlobe imaging company has continued to snap an array of unique and interesting looking images as viewed from their fleet of satellites orbiting the earth. On August 17th one of those satellites viewed this Algae Bloom off the San Diego California coastline and more specifically the seaside resort community of La Jolla.

The 2010 Atlantic hurricane season has been up to now fairly quiet, with only one hurricane and two tropical storms of the three named storms before the middle of August. Things have recently become very active, with two named storms and the low potential of another off of Africa in 24 hours. This according to the National Hurricane Center, which should be your first source of information on the latest tropical cyclone news in the Pacific and Atlantic.

Below is an image of the strongest of the two storms, Hurricane Danielle. This image was taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite at 12:50 AST (16:50 UTC) earlier today. Danielle is currently a category 1 hurricane which is not expected to be a threat to the United States and is headed northward toward Bermuda at 15 mph.

The other named storm, Tropical storm Earl is too far out yet to gauge what exactly it’ll do, but its current tracking north-west as well.

It was last week that we saw the pictures of a massive Iceberg as it begun to calve from the Petermann Glacier in Greenland. Today we get a fresh image of the newly formed Iceberg as captured by The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite on August 16th. You might remember that this is the largest such Iceberg to form in the arctic since 1962. Its size is at 97-square-miles (251 square kilometers), or three times the size of Manhattan.

Taken yesterday, NASA satellite Terra uses its Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) to view the McClure Strait a part of the Northwest passage that is mostly free of ice. The strait is named after Irish explorer Robert McClure who commanded the HMS Investigator (1848) in search of the lost John Franklin expedition, the Investigator was abandoned to pack ice on June 3rd, 1853 after three years of being stranded. McClure and his crew transited the whole of the North West passage, the rest by sledging before being rescued. Incidentally the HMS Investigator was rediscovered recently after more than 150 years, in July Parks Canada archeologists discovered the wreck with a sonar scan of Banks Island, Mercy Bay, Northwest Territories.

Launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in 2004, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft is on the verge of giving an even better understanding of the first planet Mercury. Thus far the space probe has done one Earth flyby, two Venus flybys, and three Mercury flybys which all have prepared the spacecraft for its orbital insertion in March of next year. Below is an image taken in May of our planet and the moon from 183 million kilometers (114 million miles) away, clearly visible as a bright white dot with a smaller dot nearby being the moon.

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

In the lower left portion of this image, the Earth can be seen, as well as the much smaller Moon to Earth’s right. When MESSENGER took this image, a distance of 183 million kilometers (114 million miles) separated the spacecraft and Earth. To provide context for this distance, the average separation between the Earth and the Sun is about 150 million kilometers (93 million miles). Though it is a beautiful, thought-provoking picture, viewing our planet from far away was not the main reason that the mission team planned the collection of this image. Instead, this image was acquired as part of MESSENGER’s campaign to search for vulcanoids, small rocky objects that have been postulated to exist in orbits between Mercury and the Sun. Though no vulcanoids have yet been detected, the MESSENGER spacecraft is in a unique position to look for smaller and fainter vulcanoids than has ever before been possible. MESSENGER’s vulcanoid searches occur near perihelion passages, when the spacecraft’s orbit brings it closest to the Sun. Today is another such perihelion, and MESSENGER is taking a new set of images to search for tiny asteroids lurking close to the Sun.

Latest satellite image of Tropical Storm Dianmu as it moves towards the Korean Peninsula, as imaged by NASA’s Terra earth observing satellite earlier today.

Tropical Storm Dianmu blew over the East China Sea in early August 2010, traveling slowly toward the Korean Peninsula. On August 10, 2010, the U.S. Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) reported that Dianmu had winds of 55 knots (100 kilometers per hour) with gusts up to 70 knots (130 kilometers per hour). JTWC stated that the storm was roughly 270 nautical miles (500 kilometers) south-southwest of Seoul.

Amazing images just released by the European Space Agency of a truly massive iceberg being born off Greenland. Four times the size of Manhattan or roughly 97 square miles (251 square kilometers) in size, this is the largest iceberg to form in the arctic since 1962 according to the University of Delaware. You can see below how the new berg calved from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier in these images taken from the ESA satellite Envisat, enjoy.

Fires burning around Moscow continue to provide health risks, aircraft delays, and generally covering the city of Moscow in Russia with smoke. NASA’s Aqua satellite, with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) took this natural color image as it passed overhead. Showing just how much smoke there is covering the city as seen earlier today. For images closer to the ground to further understand why there is a smokey haze over the capital city of Russia, I’d recommend The Boston Globe’s Big Picture website.

Fires continued burning around Moscow on August 7, 2010, forcing airports to delay flights, and prompting locals to stay indoors or venture out only with gauze masks, Bloomberg reported. Carbon monoxide levels in the capital city were several times the maximum allowable limit. Meanwhile, firefighters fought 577 fires covering 193,516 hectares (747 square miles).

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this natural-color image on August 7. Red outlines indicate actively burning fires, and multiple fires cluster east of Moscow, many of them sending their smoke right over the city. Smoke almost completely hides the land surface throughout this scene.

High temperatures contributed to tinder-dry conditions along the Volga River, and Bloomberg reported that temperatures as high as 42 degrees Celsius (108 degrees Fahrenheit) would continue to plague central Russia for at least another day.