The Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, has made it’s first major heliospheric discovery. Finding unprecedented temperature changes, we are gaining critical data about how heat travels from the sun’s core to its various destinations in our solar system.

IRIS is designed to provide significant new information to increase our understanding of energy transport into the corona and solar wind and provide an archetype for all stellar atmospheres. The unique instrument capabilities, coupled with state of the art 3-D modeling, will fill a large gap in our knowledge of this dynamic region of the solar atmosphere. The mission will extend the scientific output of existing heliophysics spacecraft that follow the effects of energy release processes from the sun to Earth.

IRIS will provide key insights into all these processes, and thereby advance our understanding of the solar drivers of space weather from the corona to the far heliosphere, by combining high-resolution imaging and spectroscopy for the entire chromosphere and adjacent regions. IRIS will resolve in space, time, and wavelength the dynamic geometry from the chromosphere to the low-temperature corona to shed much-needed light on the physics of this magnetic interface region.

Scientists are intensively tracking the workings of planet Earth with satellites that chart its winds, ocean currents, temperatures, plant growth, and more. They are constructing a new virtual Earth based on physical equations, satellite data, and computer codes that show the workings of our planet in whole new ways.

Our world, Earth, is changing before our eyes. Go back millions of years. Forests reached into polar regions, sea levels rose, and temperatures soared with high levels of the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A long cooling period followed. But now CO2 is on the rise again. What will happen? How will we live in the New World that’s now emerging?

Scientists are intensively tracking the workings of planet Earth with satellites that chart its winds, ocean currents, temperatures, plant growth, and more. And with a new virtual Earth, shrunk down and converted into physical equations, satellite data, and computer codes they are able to show the workings of our planet in whole new ways..

This other Earth, a mirror of the one in which we live, is designed to follow the flow of heat through the complex, dynamic engine known as the climate… and to predict its future evolution. Continue reading Cosmic Journeys – HyperEarth →

Titan (or Saturn VI) is the largest moon of Saturn. It is the only natural satellite known to have a dense atmosphere and the only object, other than Earth, for which clear evidence of stable bodies of surface liquid has been found. However, these bodies of liquid are incredibly still, with no sign of wave activity. What is causing this incredible phenomenon?

A sungrazing comet is a comet that passes extremely close to the Sun at perihelion — sometimes within a few thousand kilometers of the Sun’s surface. While small sungrazers can be completely evaporated during such a close approach to the Sun, larger sungrazers can survive many perihelion passages. However, the strong evaporation and tidal forces they experience often lead to their fragmentation.

What can these comets tell us about our solar system? Perhaps they can even reveal some of the mysteries of the sun itself…

From NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio. Analysis of the meteor that flew in over Russia tells a surprising tale. Shortly after dawn on Feb. 15, 2013, a bolide measuring 18 meters across and weighing 11,000 metric tons, screamed into Earth’s atmosphere at 18.6 kilometers per second. Burning from the friction with Earth’s thin air, the space rock exploded 23.3 kilometers above Chelyabinsk, Russia.

The event led to the formation of a new dust belt in Earth’s stratosphere. Scientists used data from the NASA-NOAA Suomi NPP satellite along with the GEOS-5 computational atmospheric model to achieve the first space-based observation the long-term evolution of a bolide plume.

From NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio. In only five short years, the FERMI Space Telescope has observed and catalogued an astounding amount of phenomena, including some of the most high-energy events in our galaxy.

The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (FGST), formerly called the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), is a space observatory being used to perform gamma-ray astronomy observations from low Earth orbit. Its main instrument is the Large Area Telescope (LAT), with which astronomers mostly intend to perform an all-sky survey studying astrophysical and cosmological phenomena such as active galactic nuclei, pulsars, other high-energy sources and dark matter. Another instrument aboard Fermi, the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM; formerly GLAST Burst Monitor), is being used to study gamma-ray bursts.

Take a look at the recent changes that are taking place at Earth’s North and South Pole. Tom Wagner, the Cryosphere program manager at NASA, takes a look at the loss of Artic Sea Ice, changes in Greenland and Antarctica, and reveals some surprisingly blatant truths about what is happening to our planet.

One of the greatest scientific endeavors ever launched. Hubble sees back to the early days of the universe. Revel in this big picture look at what Hubble does, adapted from Hubblecast, with the incomparable Dr. J.

A new type of exoplanet finder comes on line in the next year. Working with the giant telescopes of the Chilean outback, the Very Large Telescope on Mt Paranal, it will distinguish the polarized light of planet atmospheres from the light of their parent stars. This new planet detection system offers an ingenious new way to tease out the light of a planet with the overwhelming brightness of a star. Adapted from EsoCast, with Dr. J.

This is a preview of our upcoming episode of COSMIC JOURNEYS. Look for it in mid-October. It’s an ambitious attempt to explore the relevance of major past climate change to today. In particular, we look at the last interglacial, the Eemian, when sea levels rose to somewhere between four and eight meters higher than today. Interestingly, temperatures were only modestly higher than today and carbon dioxide levels were substantially lower. That’s an example of the many twists and turns in the tangled history of our dynamic planet.