That Was The Week That Was, July 19-23, 2010. . . A Digest of Goddard People, Science, & Media, PLUS Historical Tidbits and Our Best Stuff in the Blogpodcastotwittersphere
gamma blitz
MONDAY JULY 19: A year ago, something hit Jupiter, the Hubble Space Telescope saw it, and Goddard scientists were part of the response.
SPRECHEN SIE GAMMA BLITZ? The website for the German magazine Der Spiegel has produced a cool video — it’s (duh) in German, by the way — about last week’s breaking news about a gamma-ray burst (GRB) that temporarily “blinded” the Swift observatory. In German, a GRB is called a “gamma blitz.” (Yup, they make you first watch a commercial, in German, before the gamma-ray blitz starts.)
AWESOME STATISTIC: The NASA Blueshift Weekly Awesomeness Round-up takes the prize this week for most blogolicious science statistic. NASA scientists helped discovered a black hole with massive jets blasting from its poles. “If the black hole were shrunk to the size of a soccer ball,” scientist Robert Scoria explained, “each jet would extend from the Earth to beyond the orbit of Pluto.”
TUESDAY JULY 20: Today in 1976, NASA’s Viking 1 Lander touched down safely on the surface of Mars. Also, a NASA mission called “Apollo 11″ landed two guys on the moons, whereupon one of them, named Neil Armstrong, went outside to take a giant leap for mankind. . . . The National Aeronautics and Space Administration Facebook page did a lusciously detailed and dramatic series of posts reenacting the mission.
UP FROM THE DEPTHS: The central peak of Aristarchus Crater on the moon has deep origins. Read about it on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LROC) Featured Image website.
SLICK OPERATIONS: See the NASA satellite time-lapse video of the Gulf oil spill through July 14, 2010.
HOW HIGH THE FOREST? The NASA Earth Science News Team’s Adam Voiland features a first-of-its kind map of the height of the world’s forests — based on data collected by NASA’s ICESat, Terra, and Aqua satellites.
star power
WEDNESDAY JULY 21: NASA-funded researcher Bo-wen Shen re-runs the formation of the Tropical Cyclone Nargis in a supercomputer. COOL SHIPS: On the What On Earth blog, NASA Earth Science News Team reporter Gretchen Cook-Anderson profiles NASA/Goddard scientist Charles Kironji, who discovered that the wakes of ocean-going ships have a local chilling effect on climate. ATTRACTIVE: Sparkley loopy new shot of our supermagnetic home star from the Solar Dynamics Observatory uploads to the Goddard Flickr site.
booted out
THURSDAY JULY 22: Today in 1962, NASA launched the ill-fated Mariner 1 spacecraft bound for Venus. The vehicle was destroyed by the Range Safety Officer 293 seconds after launch when it veered off course.
GIRLS IN SPACE: Ten Girl Scout teams nationwide, including two girls from Kansas, spent the week at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland as part of a NASA’s “Girls in Space” program. . . . This evening, members of the Goddard Astronomy Club held a special star party for the Scouts at the Visitor Center, featuring the moon, Venus, Saturn, and summer constellations.
COSMIC COOKERY: A new video explains how a powerful instrument called a mass spectrometer figures out the recipe of the universe.
FROZEN FLOW: NASA Earth Science News Team writer Kathryn Hansen reports on the Antarctic Surface Accumulation and Ice Discharge (ASAID) project. The project is making a new map of the “grounding line” where ice breaks off into the ocean.
AND STAY OUT! NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has detected two stars being tossed out of the Milky Way Galaxy.
FRIDAY JULY 23: The historic Landsat 1 satellite launched this day in 1972. Images from Landsat 1 demonstrated the usefulness of remote sensing data for land surveys, land management, water resource planning, agricultural forecasting, forest management, sea ice movement, and cartography.
HOT LINKS: The University of Virginia Engineering Department’s E-News Online for July profiles Alexandra Hoeft (Engr Sci, Math’11), a spring 2010 intern with NASA Undergraduate Student Research Program (USRP). Hoeft worked for 15 weeks at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with NASA mentor Stephen Waterbury. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ 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.
