This week the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) “Pick of the Week” offers a video clip of a massive loop of hot plasma caught by one of NASA’s twin STEREO spacecraft. Here’s a video loop of the event, compressing hours of time into a few seconds.
Says the SOHO website:
The STEREO (Ahead) spacecraft watched as an eruptive prominence near the back of the Sun arched up but then headed back to the Sun’s surface over a few hours (Sept. 19, 2010). Prominence eruptions occur fairly frequently and with both STEREO spacecraft now able to see most of the Sun, we do observe more of them.
And one great prominence deserves another. Check out this whopper from back in April:
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION?All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
One recent Saturday in August, I woke at 4:30 a.m., rubbed my eyes in the early morning darkness, and headed for Goddard Space Flight Center to watch the launch of an Atlas 5. The rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida, carrying a military communications satellite into high geosynchronous orbit.
My perch: the Flight Dynamics Facility, which I described in an earlier post about FDF’s support of Shuttle and Space Station missions.
The FDF operations area is a large room packed with computer workstations. The mission of the FDF is to provide precise pointing coordinates to enable ground stations and satellites to track launch vehicles like the Atlas V into space. FDF also pitches in to track the Shuttle orbiter and the Space Station in low-Earth orbit to maintain links to the ground.
This video, with voiceover by FDF junior systems engineer Jason Laing, explains some of the major events in the launch of the Atlas V:
Start of show: I got in at around 6 a.m. and met the lead engineer for this launch, Syed Hasan. Bleary-eyed but alert, he got in at 12:30 a.m. to begin check-outs of the computer and communications systems. By Syed’s side for the launch: James Cappellari. A nearly 50-year veteran of NASA, Cappellari helped to develop and implement the Space Network. I deposited the obligatory bucket of donut-like objects in the FDF break room and got ready for “start of show.”
Start of show in the FDF is 10 minutes before launch, which today is slated for 7:07 a.m. At start of show, a TDRS satellite hovering above the U.S. East Coast will start tracking the Atlas right on the pad. Today it is TDRS 10, but TDRS 4 is also available for East Coast launches.
The AEHF satellite
FDF’s partner in this and other launches is the White Sands Complex in New Mexico, which controls the satellites comprising NASA’s Space Network. Eight TDRS satellites currently provide global tracking, communications, and data links for manned and unmanned spacecraft. When rockets phone home, it is often via the TDRS network.
About the time I arrived at FDF, Syed sent something to White Sands called an autothroughput test vector. This tests the system that would allow FDF to send pointing data directly to the TDRS satellites during launch, bypassing White Sands.
But that would only happen if the satellites drifted off their targets and needed to be repointed. Throughout the launch the ELV (expendable launch vehicle) team at FDF watches to make sure the satellites are pointing at the rocket and able to track it accurately. FDF supports 10 to 15 ELV launches per year.
The rocket “talks” to the ground via data links, so accurate pointing is important. During Space Station missions, accurate pointing of TDRS’ high bandwidth antennas allows astronauts and cosmonauts to wave hello to us earthlings via video downlink. Scientific spacecraft also use TDRS to pipe data to the surface on a regular basis. Without accurate pointing of the TDRS satellites, NASA’s operations in low-earth orbit would be much more limited.
Syed Hasan (left) and James Cappellari
As lead engineer on the ELV team today, Syed runs some FDF software called acquisition data generator, which he would use to create and send a pointing correction vector during launch, if needed. Rows of numbers on his monitor allows Syed to keep an eye on the actual “beam angles” of the TDRS antennas indicating what direction they point.
But FDF now has another tool in their kit for making sure the Space Network is on target. It’s called the SN Beams Display, and it was developed by FDF engineers with a combination of commercial and in-house software code. Today, FDF’s John Bez is manning the SN Beams.
The SN Beams creates a live view of the spacecraft from pad to orbit as well as the TDRS “beams.” Each beam is a cone of space, rendered in green or white, that indicates the position and coverage of the antenna. When a launch vehicle or satellite leaves the beam, it is out of range to that particular satellite, and another in the network must pick up the tracking — sort of like relay racers passing the baton.
During launches, the SN Beams provides visual clues to the FDF about the difference between where each satellite is supposed to be pointing (green), based on pre-calculated pointing data, and where the satellites are actually pointing (white).
Two other members of the team, Eric Smith and Jason Laing, are on hand to check the position of the launch vehicle at several key stages of the launch based on actual telemetry data from the rocket. For this they use two terminals running the “LRP” software, for Launch Reentry Processor. If the craft is not where it’s supposed to be, it might be necessary to adjust the pointing data for the TDRS satellites.
Here is a video of the launch of the AEHF rocket! This is video from the launch contractor, ULA:
Atlas away! The magic moment finally comes at 7:07 a.m., when the Russian-made RD-180 main engine roars to life, supplemented by four solid rocket boosters strapped onto the first stage.
10…9…8…7… you know the rest. There is something about a countdown that is thrilling. It’s a high-stakes game when you launch a multi-billion dollar satellite. There is little room for error.
The early events happen quickly.
At 1:40 into the launch the SRBs cut out; 16 seconds later they jettison. The SN Beams shows this in detail, as three little cartoon SRBs pop off the Atlas V booster and fall into the video game Atlantic Ocean. The live feed from Florida just shows the brilliant plume of the rocket receding into the blue sky.
At 3:27 the faring on the front of the Atlas pops open like two clamshells, exposing the satellite mounted to the top of a Centaur second-stage booster. The main engine is still burning.
At 4:17 the main engine shuts down, an event FDF people call MECO (“mee-koe”), for main engine cut-off. After a short coast, the second stage “Centaur” fires up.
Light that candle!
At 14:08, the Centaur shuts off and the vehicle coasts for almost 8 minutes. Then, at 22:17, it fires up again for about 5 minutes to accelerate the satellite into the higher geosynchronous orbit. The Centaur will cut out and finally release the AEHF satellite 51 minutes into the launch.
Two hours after launch, it’s “end of show” for the FDF. At this point, FDF no longer has responsibility for supplying pointing data to White Sands. However, they continue to monitor for some time, just in case their services are needed.
Big fat planet: I have to say, watching this all on the SN Beams was a real surprise to me, because it shows just how huge Earth is and how puny even the mighty Atlas V is in comparison. After the rocket had been blasting away furiously for almost five minutes, it was still barely over the Atlantic Ocean, heading east.
At 10 minutes, the launch vehicle was screaming through the atmosphere at more than 15,000 mph, the Centaur was still firing. After 20 minutes, the craft was barely over West Africa. At the moment the satellite was released, 51 minutes into the launch, it hadn’t completed a single orbit yet.
This tells you that Earth is BIG and massive. Escaping its gravity to a geosynchronous altitude of 22,500 miles requires a lot of fuel and a lot of time.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION?All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
SUNDAY September 19: On this day in 1961, NASA Administrator James E. Webb announced that the site of the NASA center dedicated to human space flight would be Houston, Texas. This became the Manned Spacecraft Center, renamed the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in 1973.
Lightning bug: a football-sized nanosatellite gets ready to investigate mysterious gamma-ray flashes above storm clouds.
Blueshift:Weekly Awesomeness Round Up features a dwarf galaxy, a lunar pit crater, and other highlights from astronomy and space science.
Try, try again: On this day in 1966, Surveyor 2 launched to the moon. It was the second of a series designed to achieve a soft landing on the moon and to return lunar surface photography for determining characteristics of the lunar terrain for Apollo lunar landing missions. But due to an engine misfire in space, the craft tumbled out of control and made a new crater on the moon 3 days later.
TUESDAY September 21: Robert Simmon’s Elegant Figures blog resurrects a haunting photo of the Milky Way from orbit snapped by a Shuttle astronaut.
WEDNESDAY September 22: Hubble zooms in on the Lagoon Nebula in vivacious HD video. Cue angelic choir music. . .
Strike zone: The What On Earth blog features a “bedazzling” time-lapsed display of lightning over less than 30 seconds across the Pawnee National Grasslands, as first shown in the Earth science Picture of the Day (EPOD).
Have a ball:NASA Blueshift takes a road trip to the set of the Big Bang Theory TV show to see a cosmic beachball.
THURSDAY September 23: A new computer simulation shows what dust in our solar system may look like to faraway alien astronomers. And Geeked On Goddard talks about the challenges of simulating a billion billion billion interplanetary dust bunnies.
Trouble in paradise: MODIS Image of the Day spots fires on Fiji.
Life science:Inside Astrobiology profiles NASA meteorite researcher Danny Glavin in a new video.
FRIDAY September 24: NASA’s traveling museum exhibition, New Views of the Universe, featuring the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes, opens at Imagination Station museum in Toledo today.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION?All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
A few years ago, a University of Maryland graduate student, Christopher Stark, crossed paths with NASA astrophysicist Marc Kuchner. “He landed in my office and asked me if I had any projects,” Kuchner recalls.
Stark needed to do some interesting and original science so he could become a professional scientist instead of a professional student; Kuchner needed help with his interesting and original research on how planets sculpt the disks of dust and gas in alien star systems, creating features like rings, gaps, and clumps.
And maybe, just maybe, by imaging those rings, gaps, and clumps in disks of dust around alien star systems, we might be able to discover planets. In other words, we might find planets by spotting their gravitational pull on their surroundings, as opposed to taking a picture of the actual planets, which is a rare and delicate trick.
New model
Fast forward to summer 2010. Stark finishes his PhD thesis on computer modeling of dust disks around alien stars, gets a sweet job at Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., and is the lead author on a paper describing aforementioned interesting and original science in the September 7, 2010, Astronomical Journal. Life is good!
Read the Goddard Space Flight Center press release and video for the science details. Stark and Kuchner basically simulated the dust in our own solar system and showed what it would look like to alien astronomers observing from afar. (Hint: they can see a ring-shaped collection of dust with a gap due to the influence of Neptune.)
Here, let’s talk about how Stark and Kuchner simulated dusty solar systems in the supercomputer down the hall from me.
click to make me bigger!
The “debris disks” around stars contain an unimaginable number of tiny grains of dust — “dust” being tiny clots of crusty minerals and frozen vapors. Fluffy interplanetary dust bunnies, really.
As planets orbit, their gravity can induce rings and clumps in the dust. And because warm interplanetary dust radiates infrared energy, telescopes trillions of miles away can actually SEE the rings and clumps even though they can’t see the planets creating them.
Kuchner and Stark decided to build a more realistic computer simulation of dusty disks with planets. It could prove a pretty handy tool for spotting planets someday.
The problem: too many dust bunnies! Getting a computer to track the movements and interactions of so many bits of stuff is, well, practically impossible.
Ever heard of the “three body problem”? For physicists of olde like Sir Isaac Newton, calculating the motions of three gravitating bodies in free space was enough to induce cardiac arrest. Dauntingly, terrifyingly, slide-rule-breakingly hard.
“How,” Kuchner asks, “do you figure out the answer without having to figure out a billion billion billion collisions?”
Stalking dust bunnies
Tracking a billion billion billion dust bunnies is not even worth considering, even with the formidable computing resources down the hall from me at Goddard, that being the Discover supercomputer.
But Stark and Kuchner found a way. They call it the collisional grooming algorithm.
An algorithm is a precise set of mathematical rules that describes how to solve a problem. Stark and Kuchner used it to simulate 75,000 virtual dust particles and track their motions and number in response to grain-grain collisions and the gravitational tug of planets.
But what about all the other dust bunnies, the billion-billion-billion?
“We allow each single integrated particle to represent many dust grains,” Stark explains. “We scale the number of dust grains up and down to control how much dust is in the disk, even though we only actually integrate 75,000 particles.”
But let nobody leave the room thinking that approximating the behavior of 10 billion billion billion dust bunnies is easy.
At Goddard, we have a supercomputer called Discover. The thingies that do the actual data processing in a computer are called processors, and Discover presently has about 15,000 of them. That’s the number of processors in 7,500 MacBook Pro laptops like the one I used to write this blog post. Which is to say, my laptop packs an Intel Core Duo, or two processors, whereas the Discover supercomputer packs about 15,000 processors. Soon, Discover will double in capacity to nearly 30,000 processors.
To run Stark and Kuchner’s interplanetary dust bunny simulation required about 3,000 processors — the equivalent of 1,500 MacBook Pro’s — running for 24 hours!
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION?All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
Sunday September 12: “…but because it’s hard.”On this day in 1962, President John F. Kennedy delivered his famous moon speech at Rice Stadium and inspired a generation. Mae Jemison had a dream, which was to fly in space. And she did it on this day in 1992 as the first African American woman in orbit.
Monday September 13: See the sea ice snapshot of the Arctic by the Aqua satellite.
NASA Blueshift:Weekly Awesomeness Round Up looks at highlights of the past week, including planet-eating stars and a golden moment for the Webb Telescope’s mirrors.
Wednesday September 15: The Lunar Reconnaissance looked over its shoulder at Earth on September 9 and captured this global portrait.
Sea ice
Thursday September 16: The lunar surface is more complicated than you think. Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter reveals why. Don’t miss the cool video about LRO’s crater counting laser altimeter instrument.
The sun gets loopy:see a new video of looping prominences on the surface of the sun.
Saturday September 18: Got moon? Earth’s moon, that is. Join the global gathering International Observe the Moon Night this Saturday night to celebrate our companion in the solar system.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION?All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
Steele Hill, Goddard’s salesman of all things solar, just posted the latest weekly release of Sun imagery, courtesy of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Steele dubs it “The South Rises Again”
SDO watched as an active region in the Sun’s southern hemisphere produced a whole series of looping arcs of plasma in profile (Sept. 11-13, 2010). The arcs are actually charged particles spiraling along magnetic field lines. The images were taken in extreme ultraviolet light and reveal the dynamic activity visible above active regions. The material seen here is ionized iron heated to about one million degrees. We have seen very little activity in this hemisphere as opposed to the northern one, hence the tongue in cheek title.
This image is a feast, but it’s true beauty shines through when you play the video. It’s a whopper of a file, so make sure you’ve got a fast Internet connection and give it a few seconds to download.
click to zoom in on the action
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION?All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
With a 6.5 meter diameter mirror, the James Webb Space Telescope will operate at a temperature of only 35 degrees above absolute zero in a deep space orbit.
Imagine you are a mercury cadmium telluride infrared detector chip, chillaxing in deep space nearly a million miles from Earth.
(OK, I know it’s a stretch, but give it a try.)
You are riding on the James Webb Space Telescope, the most high-tech space observatory ever attempted. But in the end, mission success rides on you, little infrared photon detector chip! You are the retinas of this great observatory. It sees only as well as YOU see.
So you are sitting there, peering out at the darkness, waiting for a photon from the dawn of the universe to pierce your semiconductor crystal matrix and knock an electron out of its comfy valence shell and into the conduction band. This generates the faintest of electric currents. This means data: the stuff of astronomical discoveries.
But 12 times an hour, the humming of electrons in your crystal guts is an illusion, a lie. Infrared telescope scientists call it dark current.
I learned about dark current at a recent colloquium here at Goddard. Three heavy hitters in the Webb Telescope project gave an update on the fabrication and testing of this multi-billion dollar space telescope.
Mark Clampin, the Webb Telescope project scientist, brought us up to speed on the observatory as a whole. He mentioned that 17 percent of Webb’s “flight mass” — the stuff that will blast into space on a giant Arianne launch vehicle — is now built. That represents about a billion dollars in gear.
Randy Kimble also spoke. He is the Webb mission’s Integration & Test Project Scientist. He gave us a progress report on the telescope’s instruments. And it was all good news: The flight versions of the instruments — again, the ones that will actually go into space — will begin arriving at Goddard next summer to be shaken, frozen, and irradiated during a series of grueling tests.
But the first speaker — the one who introduced “dark current” to my vocabulary — was John Mather. He gave a concise summary of the observatory’s science mission.
At one point, he bragged up Webb’s detectors. These are the chips, like the CCD in your digital camera, that turn infrared photons from farthest cosmos into trickley little electric currents and, ultimately, astronomical data.
(You may recall that John C. Mather shared the 2006 the Nobel Prize in Physics with George F. Smoot for their discoveries related to the microwave background glow from the Big Bang, using the COBE satellite.)
The detectors are kept cold by a combination of the ambient chill of deep space and a lot of clever engineering to block the sun’s rays and isolate the instruments from 220 watts of heat radiating from the telescope’s on-board electronics. Mather bragged that Webb’s infrared detectors have “dark currents measured in a few electrons per hour per pixel.”
Huh? Dark what? The phrase “dark current” and the idea of measuring single electrons per hour set off my cool-o-meter.
As the colloquium ended, I hurried to the head of the room hoping to grab Mather’s attention before someone else got to him. “The statistic you mentioned about dark currents. Can you explain?”
He said that each pixel of each detector spontaneously generates about a dozen electrons per hour — that’s the dark current — simply staring off into empty space. Hence the term: dark current. A perfect detector would produce nothing, just total silence, unless an actual infrared photon came in and bonked one of its atoms.
But, hey, 12 electrons per hour is pretty dark! And out of that darkness, we hope, will come the data to illuminate our understanding of the birth of the first stars, the evolution of galaxies, and the nature of planetary systems around other stars.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION?All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
It’s hurricane season. And if you live on the Atlantic Coast, like gogblog, you sometimes get to wondering. . . What gives birth to these giant storms? How do tropical storms grow into hurricanes? Why do some fade early, while others reach category 5?
Watch this colorful and dynamic Goddard TV web short to get the answers: 27 Storms: Arlene to Zeta. It looks back on the destructive 2005 hurricane season — the one that gave us Katrina and the New Orleans catastrophe. The season birthed an astounding 27 named storms, beating 1933′s record of 21 nameable storms.
Got FiOS or some other fast Internet access? Go to the Scientific Visualization Studio website to download high-resolution versions of the video.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION?All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
MONDAY September 6: Blueshift’s Weekly Awesomeness Round Up highlights Stephen Colbert’s astronaut encounter, an image from an Indian radio telescope, America’s top chef in orbit, and other astronomical-scientific tidbits of the previous week.
TUESDAY September 7: Sensors on Terra and Aqua satellites spot fires for a new United Nations website.
WEDNESDAY September 8: LROC Image of the Day: the moon seen from the east.
River of sorrow: NASA Earth Observatory Image of the Day shows the swollen Indus River and flooded fields from orbit.
Say what? The What On Earth bloggers have posted an Earth-related mystery sound. Well, THAT narrows it down! See if you can guess what it is.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION?All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
*** gogblog is happy to announce a new guest blogger: Phil Evans. He’s an X-ray astronomer in England who taps into NASA’s Swift satellite for data. Swift is managed, as a project, from Goddard Space Flight Center, but it was developed by scientists in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Italy. Phil works at the University of Leicester in England’s East Midlands.
In an earlier post, I told the story of how Phil discovered a blindingly bright (in X-rays) gamma-ray burst. In “Swift Universe,” Phil will give us a backstage peek at the life of an X-ray astronomer and Swiftophile. Here’s his first post, where he gives you the low-down on Swift and his role in the mission.
Flash! X-rays from this collapsing star temporarily dazzled NASA's Swift satellite
Welcome to the first Swift Universe blog, where you’ll get a (hopefully) insightful and (if you’re lucky) entertaining update on what’s going on in the universe, at least as far a member of the Swift satellite team is concerned.
Swift is a satellite which was launched in 2004 to study gamma ray bursts. These are thought to be the most powerful explosions in the universe. A typical gamma-ray burst, or GRB, gives off in 10 seconds as much energy as you would need to run your microwave for around 400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years, which is 30 million million million million times the age of the universe. Don’t try it; the bill will be horrendous.
I work in the UK branch of the Swift team, at the University of Leicester. I am part of the XRT team (that’s the X-Ray Telescope on Swift) and also part of the UK Swift Science Data Centre. My day to day work involves looking at the X-ray data from Swift and producing web-based tools to help scientists use these data.
Just recently I was involved in one of Swift’s discoveries: finding the brightest X-ray flash from outside our own galaxy ever seen. Not only was it exciting as a scientist, but it proved to be a very educational experience for me, as I was for the first time involved in writing a press release.
Although I’ve been tweeting in my role as a Swift scientist for some months now, I’ve never had to write more than 168 characters announcing something work-related to the public, and it was quite surprising how tough it was. All my natural instincts were to start blabbering on about pile-up, exclusion regions, correction factors, and ergs per second — most of which probably means nothing to most people.
Fortunately, press officers at NASA and Penn State University — and your own Geeked on Goddard blogger — were on hand, and they knew (as I now do) that “this was so bright it dazzled our telescope” conveys the “wow” factor much better than just floating numbers around does! It was a very good experience for me, and a reminder of how important it is for scientist to learn to communicate with the public. (See the Penn State press release about the X-ray GRB.)
click to see the cartoon!
I am reminded of an excellent PhD Comic item lampooning “The Science News Cycle.” The jokes are a bit of an exaggeration, but not always so far from the truth!
And I think in the age of the Internet, where nonsense and half-truths can spread so quickly, it’s increasingly important for scientists to communicate properly. Take all of the climate change skepticism that exists at the moment for example. Why is it that so many people who are not trained scientists and without having conducted extensive research, tend not believe the scientists who really are experts?
“. . . in the age of the Internet, where nonsense and half-truths can spread so quickly, it’s increasingly important for scientists to communicate properly.”
I don’t know the answer, but if scientists were as good at communicating their research as skeptics and conspiracy theorists are at communicating their doubts, perhaps this situation would not exist.
Like a lot of us, you might be wondering WHY that GRB was so bright in X-rays, especially as it was at other wavelengths a fairly typical burst. Right now, we still don’t know.
I suppose you could call this the “unsexy” part of the science, although this can be where the real excitement comes and you just can’t see it. In public we show the thrill of the discovery, and eventually the satisfaction of writing a paper explaining it. (This effort will be led by Tilan Ukwatta at Goddard Space Flight Center, who was the duty scientist with overall responsibility for this GRB).
But in between comes the real work and (for us) the real fun. It’s the subtle cut and thrust duel with the universe as we try to prise open its secrets, exploiting the details of our data, battling with their limits and finding out how it all fits into the bigger picture. It probably doesn’t make for exciting reading as we go along (“Within 3-sigma we’re consistent with the k=2 closures, assuming…..”) but when you consider the vastness of the universe, plugging away at its mysteries is a real privilege, and the reason we’re in this business.
My own current theory probably won’t make it into the scientific paper: this year the University of Leicester celebrates 50 years of performing space science research. Although the GRB went off before the celebratory conference, thanks to my holiday we didn’t make this discovery until the conference has started. So the cause is obvious: the universe was saying “Happy Birthday” to Space Science at the University of Leicester!
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION?All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
MONDAY September 6: Blueshift’s 
GRIPping tale: On the What On Earth blog, 
RATS! Two 
