Coronal mass injection find could see ‘textbooks rewritten’
The Verge: NASA says it has made a discovery which will require “rewriting textbooks” after it found the two rings of charged particles surrounding the Earth - called Van Allen belts - were reconfigured by a coronal mass injection. Not only are the belts now believed to be more malleable, the mass injection revealed for the first time the formation of a third belt.
Photo: An image of a giant prominence on the sun before it erupted is captured on August 31, 2012, by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). This may have been one of the causes of a third radiation belt that appeared around Earth a few days later. (Credit: NASA/SDO/AIA/Goddard Space Flight Center)
The remains of Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong are committed to the sea during a service held onboard the USS Philippine Sea in the Atlantic Ocean.
(Photo: Bill Ingalls / NASA)
More on the service from NBC News here:http://nbcnews.to/RXuNKi
They used a toothbrush to repair one of mankind’s most ambitious science projects ever.
Astronauts are boss.
Spacewalking Astronaut ‘Touches’ the Sun
In legend, the bright sun was a dazzling temptation for Icarus and so, too, it is for NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, who appears to touch our closest star in a photo snapped during a spacewalk this week.
Astronauts Williams and Hoshide spent six hours and 28 minutes working to remove a stuck bolt using improvised tools made from spare parts, including a toothbrush.
Photograph: ISS/NASA
One of the fascinating shots in our monthly gallery of images captured by European Space Agency and Nasa satellites:
The city of Shanghai (right) sits along the delta banks of the Yangtze river along the eastern coast of China. It is the world’s most populous city (the 2010 census counted 23 million people, including “unregistered” residents). With so many humans, the city is a tremendous sight at night. The bright lights of the city centre and the distinctive new skyscrapers that form the skyline along the Pudong district (the eastern shore of the Huangpu river, a tributary of the Yangtze that cuts through the centre of Shanghai) make for spectacular night viewing both on the ground and from space. On the left is Suzhou located 120km from Shanghai
Life imitates art in Perpetual Ocean, an absolutely gorgeous HD animation of our ocean currents as NASA Scientific Visualization Studio sees. Any fan of Van Gogh’s Starry Nights will see the beauty in this enchanting interpretation of data.
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Bright Planets at McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope
Image Credit: Mike Line (Caltech), Ed Mierkiewicz (Univ. Wisconsin-Madison), Ron Oliversen (NASA-GSFC)
