NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), best known for cutting-edge images of the sun, has made a discovery right here on Earth.
“It’s a new form of ice halo,” says atmospheric optics expert Les Cowley of England. “We saw it for the first time at the launch of SDO–and it is teaching us new things about how shock waves interact with clouds.”
Ice halos are rings and arcs of light that appear in the sky when sunlight shines through ice crystals in the air. A familiar example is the sundog—a rainbow-colored splash often seen to the left or right of the morning sun. Sundogs are formed by plate-shaped ice crystals drifting down from the sky like leaves fluttering from trees.
Last year, SDO destroyed a sundog—and that’s how the new halo was discovered.
Source: Science@NASA
Author: Dr. Tony Phillips
This week,the NASA Explorer Schools project enrolled its 1,000th participant. The projectincludes educators from schools in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico,plus a U.S. State Department/Department of Defense school in Turkmenistan.That’s quite an accomplishment!
This movie shows a spherical map of the Sun, formed from a combination of STEREO Ahead and Behind beacon images, along with an SDO/AIA image in between. The movie starts with the view of the Sun as seen from Earth, with the 0 degree meridian line in the middle. The map then rotates through 360 degrees to show the part of the Sun not visible from Earth. The black wedge shows the part of the Sun not yet visible to the STEREO spacecraft.
On Feb. 14, 2011, NASA’s Stardust-NExT (New Exploration of Tempel 1) mission will encounter Comet Tempel 1, providing a unique opportunity to measure the dust properties of two separate comets (Wild 2 and Tempel 1) with the same instrument for accurate data comparison. The encounter also will provide a comparison between two observations of a single comet, Tempel 1, taken before and after a single orbital pass around the sun.
NASA’s Deep Impact mission observed Comet Tempel 1 in the summer of 2005, as the comet was inbound toward the sun on its approximately 5.5-year orbit between Mars and Jupiter. Deep Impact’s primary mission was to deliver a special impactor spacecraft into the path of Comet Tempel 1. The spacecraft — and many ground-based observers — observed the impact and the ejected material. Scientists were surprised the cloud was composed of a fine, powdery material, not the expected water, ice and dirt. The spacecraft did find the first evidence of surface ice on a comet instead of just inside a comet.
The NASA Explorer Schools Virtual Campus is sporting a new home page. Items You Don’t Want to Miss is a set of rotating graphics, centered on the home page. The graphics are designed to give you additional information about featured NES topics and provide a richer Web experience for everyone coming to the site. If you’re interested in finding more information about a particular topic displayed in the graphic window, click on the graphic. Each of the individual graphics is hot-linked to further information about that topic. If the graphic changes before you can select the item, use the sequence counter in the bottom left corner of the graphics window.
Here is a modified activity from Fingerprints of Life, “It’s Just Right” module. Invite your students to discuss what is meant by an extremophile and extreme environment. In this activity, students design and implement an experiment to test the extremes at which Saccharomyces cerevisiae, one-celled organisms commonly known as baker’s yeast, can metabolize, as measured by the production of carbon dioxide. The students work in groups to test the limits of salinity.