Science
Watch the sun fire off huge solar flares in this mesmerizing NASA video – Space.com
A new NASA video from a spacecraft watching the sun has captured spectacular views of solar flares erupting from the star this week just ahead of Halloween.
The video, taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Orbiter, shows mesmerizing close-up views of solar flares blasting off the sun between Monday and Thursday (Oct. 25-28), ending with a major X1-class solar storm that could amplify Earth’s northern lights displays over Halloween weekend.
“Brighter than a shimmering ghost, faster than the flick of a black cat’s tail, the sun cast a spell in our direction, just in time for Halloween,” NASA officials wrote in a video description.
Related: The sun’s wrath: Worst solar storms in history
See the northern lights?
If you take a photograph of the Halloween northern lights from the solar flare, send images and comments in to spacephotos@space.com.
The video begins with a series of solar eruptions on Monday from an active region on the left limb (or side) of the sun that “flickered with a series of small flares and petal-like eruptions of solar material,” NASA officials wrote.
Perhaps more impressive was the X1 solar flare, which exploded Thursday from a sunspot in the lower center of the sun, directly facing the Earth. X-class flares are the most powerful types of solar storms the sun can have.
“Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation,” NASA officials wrote in the video description. “Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth’s atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however — when intense enough — they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel.”
The Solar Dynamics Orbiter is part of a fleet of different spacecraft that constantly track the sun’s weather for such storms.
Thursday’s flare was accompanied by a radiation storm and a massive eruption of solar material, called a coronal mass ejection, that flung charged solar particles outward at over 2.5 million mph (4 million kph). Those particles should reach Earth this weekend and could supercharge the planet’s auroras, also known as the northern and southern lights.
Earth’s auroras occur when charged particles from the sun interact with the upper atmosphere, causing an ethereal glow. The Earth’s magnetic field funnels these particles toward polar regions, so they’re typically visible at high, northern latitudes in our hemisphere.
But the additional particles from Thursday’s solar storm could amplify the auroras to make them visible from much farther south, possibly as far south as New York, Idaho, Illinois, Oregon, Maryland and Nevada, NASA scientists have said.
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It can be difficult to see any auroras if you live near city lights as light pollution can wash out the glow, and they definitely won’t be as dazzling as the displays seen at high latitudes or by astronauts in space.
For tips on how to catch auroras on camera, check out our guides on where and how to photograph the aurora, as well as the best equipment for aurora photography and how to edit aurora photos once you have them.
And camera gear is what you need, consider our best cameras for astrophotography and best lenses for astrophotography.
Editor’s note: If you snap an amazing photo of the northern lights this weekend, let us know. You can send images and comments in to spacephotos@space.com.
Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Instagram.
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April 23 (UPI) — SpaceX launched 23 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit Tuesday evening from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Liftoff occurred at 6:17 EDT with a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sending the payload of 23 Starlink satellites into orbit.
The Falcon 9 rocket’s first-stage booster landed on an autonomous drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean after separating from the rocket’s second stage and its payload.
The entire mission was scheduled to take about an hour and 5 minutes to complete from launch to satellite deployment.
The mission was the ninth flight for the first-stage booster that previously completed five Starlink satellite-deployment missions and three other missions.
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Voyager 1 has finally returned usable data to NASA from outside the solar system after five months offline.
Launched in 1977 and now in its 46th year, the probe has been suffering from communication issues since November 14. The same thing also happened in 2022. However, this week, NASA said that engineers were finally able to get usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems.
Slow Work
Fixing Voyager 1 has been slow work. It’s currently over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, which means a radio message takes about 22.5 hours to reach it—and the same again to receive an answer.
The problem appears to have been its flight data subsystem, one of one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers. Its job is to package the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth. Since the computer chip that stores its memory and some of its code is broken, engineers had to re-insert that code into a new location.
Next up for engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California is to adjust other parts of the FDS software so Voyager 1 can return to sending science data.
Beyond The ‘Heliopause’
The longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history, Voyager 1, was launched on September 5, 1977, while its twin spacecraft, Voyager 2, was launched a little earlier on August 20, 1977. Voyager 2—now 12 billion miles away and traveling more slowly—continues to operate normally.
Both are now beyond what astronomers call the heliopause—a protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the sun, which is thought to represent the sun’s farthest influence. Voyager 1 got to the heliopause in 2012 and Voyager 2 in 2018.
The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA’s Voyager 1 at a distance of … [+]
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Pale Blue Dot
Since their launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard Titan-Centaur rockets, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have had glittering careers. Both photographed Jupiter and Saturn in 1979 and 1980 before going their separate ways. Voyager 1 could have visited Pluto, but that was sacrificed so scientists could get images of Saturn’s moon, Titan, a maneuver that made it impossible for it to reach any other body in the solar system. Meanwhile, Voyager 2 took slingshots around the planets to also image Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989—the only spacecraft ever to image the two outer planets.
On February 14, 1990, when 3.7 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 turned its cameras back towards the sun and took an image that included our planet as “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Known as the “Pale Blue Dot,” it’s one of the most famous photos ever taken. It was remastered in 2019.
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – NASA has finally heard back from Voyager 1 again in a way that makes sense.
The most distant spacecraft from Earth stopped sending back understandable data last November. Flight controllers traced the blank communication to a bad computer chip and rearranged the spacecraft’s coding to work around the trouble.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California declared success after receiving good engineering updates late last week. The team is still working to restore transmission of the science data.
It takes 22 1/2 hours to send a signal to Voyager 1, more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space. The signal travel time is double that for a round trip.
Contact was never lost, rather it was like making a phone call where you can’t hear the person on the other end, a JPL spokeswoman said Tuesday.
Launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 has been exploring interstellar space – the space between star systems – since 2012. Its twin, Voyager 2, is 12.6 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) away and still working fine.
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