From Steele Hill, solar image media maven of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, comes this trifecta of a video from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. It shows three “active regions” on the sun, where charged solar material (plasma) is flowing along vast magnetic loops on the sun’s surface. Several Earths could fit under those loops — amazing, ja? The video version is at the end of this post.
Here is Steele’s text, which is provided weekly to museums and science centers, along with the images and video:
Three active regions lined up vertically and each of the loop structures above them twisted differently (Oct. 15 – 17, 2011) when viewed in extreme ultraviolet light by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. The high arching loops of the top active region seemed to lean to the north; the one beneath it clearly coiled to the south; at the bottom one spread upright and to the left and right as well. The loops are tracing particles spiraling along magnetic field lines that have emerged from underneath the Sun’s surface. While the movie shows that the loops shifted and changed over 2.5 days, the basic structure of all three remained very much the same. It is not common to see active regions so neatly aligned atop one another.
Here are more than 200 of us at NASA/Goddard watching the Juno Mission blast off to Jupiter. A team of our scientists and engineers built an instrument Juno will use to study Jupiter’s mighty magnetic field.
To learn all the amazing stuff Juno will do when it reaches Jupiter in 5 years, see the excellent and detailed web feature by my friend Liz Zubritsky.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ 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.
In the past year or so, I was involved in a project here at Goddard to create a new iPad app and it’s finally out. It’s called the NASA Visualization Explorer.
I know, I know — what do they mean by “visualization”? Pardon the jargon. It’s the local industry around here.
“Visualization” is sorta what it sounds like. It’s the process of making something visual. In this case, the thing being visualized is data from NASA’s fleet of scientific satellites.
The crack team of scientist-artists at NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio crank this stuff out, and some of it is truly amazing work. But it doesn’t necessarily reach the public. The new iPad app will help to spread the good news: “We got viz!”
If you have an iPad, check this thing out and let us know what you think.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ 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.
NASA Goddard engineer Paul Richards in 2001, speaking to the media about his upcoming flight on the Space Shuttle mission STS-102.
What did the Space Shuttle program mean to you?
NASA engineer Paul Richards knew from the moment he saw the first one roar off the pad in 1981.
“The first launch was 1981. I was a junior in high school. I wanted to be an astronaut since I was 5 years old. So as soon as I saw that first Shuttle launch, my thoughts were, ‘That’s my ride. I’m going up on that thing.’”
And he did — once — in 2001. It changed his life.
Yesterday, Richards was one of the speakers at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center who recalled their experiences and contributions to the U.S. Space Transportation System, a.k.a., the Space Shuttle. Richards, currently Observatory Manager of the GOES-R satellite program at Goddard, flew in space in 2001 on the STS-102 mission to the International Space Station.
The video below, about 15 minutes long, contains the portion of Richards talk where he walks through his changing “perspectives” on the Shuttle, starting with that first launch in 1981: hearing of the Challenger accident while in college; coming to Goddard and using the Shuttle to launch payloads; getting to know the astronauts; becoming an astronaut; watching friends and colleagues die in the 2003 Columbia accident. And finally, yesterday, watching the final Shuttle land.
Richards was candid, honest, and humble in his storytelling. It seems to me that he and others like him are one of the most precious legacies of the Shuttle era — the NASA people who did great things and took great risks to be true to their belief in the redeeming adventure of human spaceflight.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ 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.
New interactive visualization tools developed by the NASA/European Space Agency (ESA) Helioviewer Project allow scientists and the general public to explore images captured by solar observing spacecraft. Previous posts explained the origins and aims of the Helioviewer Project, and the basics of a Web-based app called Helioviewer.org. This post looks at the behind-the-scenes technology that makes Helioviewer possible.
The Solar Dynamics Observatory beams data to Earth at a rate of 150 Mb per second.
The Helioviewer.org Web app and the JHelioviewer software are the on-screen interfaces that users see. But there is also a critical data-processing “back end” that required just as much effort to develop. The challenge was this: How do you acquire and manipulate solar images quickly enough so that the process is truly “real time,” without long waiting times for downloads and glacial refresh rates on the image view every time you make a change, like zooming in on a feature of interest?
This is particularly challenging when working with high-resolution images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. SDO sends down images that are 4,000 by 4,000 pixels, approximately the same number of pixels as in a 13 by 13 inch photographic print.
Google Maps and Google Earth overcame this issue by “tiling” large images into a checkerboard of smaller segments that could be quickly assembled into an image at the scale a user requested.
A Google Maps for the sun
The prototype of Helioviewer took this approach, too, following Google’s lead. “Google Maps was the original inspiration for it,” Helioviewer Project co-founder Jack Ireland says.
In the prototype of Helioviewer.org, each stage of a zoom-in required a complete set of tiles. The system retrieved the tiles it needed to build the view requested by the user with every click of the mouse. The trouble is, as you zoom in it requires an ever-increasing number of small tiles (numbering in the hundreds) to build the new image. Each tile is a separate file, and they all have to be labeled, stored, and pulled from storage and assembled when needed.
Then Helioviewer met JPEG2000, a standard for compressing images to make them extremely small while maintaining very good image quality. Also, JPEG2000 can extract sub-regions of the compressed image file without having to open the whole file.
In other words, the system generates only the part of the image you really want to see. If you have ever downloaded or extracted a very large compressed image file, you understand the time saving that JPEG2000 offers.
“One thing that changed early on that made a huge difference and made all this really possible is that we use this JPEG2000 technology,” Helioviewer Project co-founder Keith Hughitt explains. “Instead of generating all the possible tiles for every single image, we wait until the user asks for a tile and generate it right then, and only generate the ones we need. We were able to develop a way to do that quickly enough that you can do it right on the Web page.”
Data pipeline from Palo Alto
Lockheed Martin’s Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory, based in Palo Alto, California, that built the Atmospheric Imaging Instrument aboard SDO, uses JPEG2000 to compress every third new SDO image (i.e. one every few seconds) and then sends them through a data pipeline to Goddard. The image can be available on Helioviewer’s server at Goddard in as little as 20 minutes.
The system needs to store this one compressed master file, not hundreds of tiles. That one image file — or a portion of it — can be quickly decompressed and displayed at the resolution needed.
For example, as you click the little “plus sign” icon on Helioviewer to zoom in on a flare on the surface of the sun, the back end of the system decompresses the same file multiple times at increasing resolution — like a telephoto lens capturing an image at ever higher magnification — and displays it on your computer screen.
This “on the fly” manipulation also applies to time-lapse videos made with JHelioviewer. “JHelioviewer tells the server which portion of the images it is interested in, and the video-stream is updated in real time so that only those bits are transmitted back to JHelioviewer,” Hughitt explains. “The result is a sort of ‘dynamic’ movie stream that you can create, and then adjust as you are playing it.”
This means that as the video plays, you can zoom, pan, sharpen, brighten, or follow a specific feature across the sun. If you choose to download the video, the server renders the final product at whatever settings you choose.
If not for JPEG2000, you would need to download an entirely new version of the video – amounting to gigabytes of data – every time you made a change. Another way of saying this is “the Web back in the 1990s.”
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ 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.
Andrew Hoffmaster and GROVER, Assateague State Park, Md.
Andrew (Andy) Hoffmaster is one of the dozens of interns working this summer in the Engineering Boot Camp at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. He recently graduated from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., with a degree in biomedical engineering
It’s Hoffmaster’s third year in Engineering Boot Camp. This year he has stepped up to a leadership role, supervising five different teams of interns who are working on a science robot called GROVER. In a time-honored NASA tradition, “GROVER” is a very impressive-sounding acronym: Goddard Remotely Operated Vehicle for Exploration and Research.
GROVER on the beach.
GROVER, in a nutshell, is a solar-and-wind-powered, caterpillar-tracked rover that carries a ground-penetrating radar device. It is designed to roam alone for months at a time measuring the thickness of the Central Greenland Ice Sheet, which is about the size of Texas. “The problem with sending people is that they run out of food and fuel too fast,” explains “NASA Mike” Comberiati, who runs the internship.
Someday, GROVER will crawl across frigid Greenland at up to 3 mph, 10 hours per day, for 4 months. NASA Mike and his interns are working with NASA cryosphere researchers Lora Koenig and Hans-Peter Marshall on the project. (Koenig is based at Goddard; Marshall is at Boise State University in Idaho.
GROVER being unloaded.
Hoffmaster and GROVER have spent a lot of time together, although in his first year internship (2009), he didn’t work on GROVER at all. He designed and built the mechanical parts for a laser-scanning device on another robot, referred to as “the Mothership.” More on the Mothership in future posts, but you can take a quick look at her HERE.
GROVER 1 & 2
In his second internship season (2010), Hoffmaster started working on GROVER. He built the housing for the rover’s electronics. In January 2011, he accompanied Comberiati to McMurdo Station in Antarctica to help install and configure equipment to communicate with NOAA POES satellites.
Making tracks!
GROVER 1 (shown in the video and images in this post) weighs about 700 pounds. Its solar panels and wind turbines — the spinning blades produce power when it’s cloudy — provide ample power. It has performed admirably in testing.
But GROVER 1 is too heavy and too big, and it takes too long and too much work to unload and assemble. This summer, the interns assigned to build a better GROVER.
GROVER 2.0 will be lighter and smaller. It will sport more efficient solar panels and a lower center of gravity to resist tip-overs in gusty Greenland winds. The rover will also gain software to allow it to operate without constant human monitoring, and to uplink data via the Iridium satellite network.
Also, GROVER 2 will be fabricated in three sections to enable rapid assembly by people wearing bulky cold-weather gloves. After all, standing around in the cold in Greenland can be a health hazard!
This, and more, will require the labor of five intern teams to design, build, and test the electrical components and systems (headed by Hoffmaster) and four mechanical teams (headed by senior intern Guillermo Diaz, a student at Tec de Monterrey in Mexico). It all has to happen in about 5 weeks’ time.
Last year’s crop of interns completed construction of GROVER 1, which today sits on the front lawn of Building 25 in Goddard’s wooded east Campus. The rover will serve this year as a test bed for some of GROVER 2′s new systems.
On the beach with GROVER
It was a chilly day, April 1, 2011. Hoffmaster and three other interns drove with NASA Mike down to Assateague State Park, with GROVER on a flatbed truck. While backing GROVER down the ramps onto the beach, they paused cautiously to check the rover’s orientation.
Then something weird happened, Hoffmaster says. One of the twin caterpillar tracks switched into full reverse and tipped GROVER off the ramps and onto the sand. Thankfully, the robot was unscathed except for a piece of bent metal.
The culprit: “anomalous cold bit.” To us non-specialists, that means that because of cold temperatures, the caterpillar track’s electronic controller sent an incorrect instruction. It’s just the sort of thing that can happen during the development of new technology, and the interns will work to solve it this summer.
On the beach, GROVER proved itself, with enough traction to drag Andy across the sand. Sand, it turns out, is close enough to snow (from GROVER’s point of view) to provide a decent simulation of the rover’s performance in Greenland. They tested it until 3:30 that afternoon and headed for home.
Andy says Engineering Boot Camp gave him valuable engineering insights and skills that he will be able to apply to his new job with Aretech in Dulles, Virginia, developing physical therapy equipment for rehabilitating stroke patients. He’ll work on a device called a “body weight support gait trainer.” It’s a harness on a motorized trolley track that supports patients safely as they re-learn how to walk after brain injury. “I took what I learned at Goddard and can apply it to human kinematics.”
New interactive visualization tools developed by the NASA/European Space Agency (ESA) Helioviewer Project allow scientists and the general public to explore the growing body of high-definition images of the sun captured by solar observing spacecraft. A previous post explained the origin and aims of the Helioviewer Project. This post takes a closer look at a Web-based tool called Helioviewer.org.
When you first visit Helioviewer.org, you’ll see an orange ball. That’s the most recent image available of the sun, courtesy of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).
The Time menu At the top left of the image window, three drop-down menus allow you to choose the time and date at which you want to observe the sun, including latest, meaning “the most recent available.”
The time is given in UTC: coordinated universal time, also known as GMT, or Greenwich Mean Time. To convert to U.S. Eastern Standard Time, subtract 5 hours from UTC (and so on).
Time-step allows you to browse solar images in steps of 1 second to 1 year.
The Images menu When you first visit Helioviewer.org, the Images menu setting will default to the most recent SDO image available from the spacecraft’s Atmospheric Imagining Assembly (AIA) instrument at a wavelength of 304 Angstroms.
Think of it as looking at the sun through a filter that blocks out everything except the wavelengths near 304 Angstroms. The AIA has 10 such “channels. This Wikipedia article about SDO includes a helpful table showing the different channels and what temperature of solar material they correspond to.
To be more specific, the 304 Angstrom view from SDO is the energy emitted by positively charged helium atoms (He+) at around 60,000-80,000 degrees. In SDO images, it is commonly displayed in a rich orange color.
Click anywhere on the title bar for AIA 304. This expands your viewing options.
The Opacity slider is a fader control, allowing you to display from zero to 100 percent of the image.
Below that, drop-down menus allow you to choose the image source by observatory/spacecraft, instrument, detector, and measurement type.
So, for example, change the measurement type from AIA 304 to AIA 171. At 171 Angstroms, you see magnetic loop structures protruding from the solar surface.
The AIA 171 captures ultraviolet light from processes on the sun occurring at more than a half-million degrees (compared to AIA 304′s 60,000 degrees).
Mixing multiple images
The real magic of Helioviewer.org starts when you click Add at the top right of the image menu area. This creates a second (or third, or fourth…) image.
You can use these menus to seamlessly overlay and combine multiple images of the same solar image captured in different wavelengths by SOHO and SDO.
To do it, call up multiple images at different wavelengths and then use the Opacity sliders to meld the images together by altering their relative brightnesses.
The really cool thing is that Helioviewer.org (and JHelioviewer) allow you to visualize a process happening on the sun in different ways (by overlaying images from different instruments). Or you can explore the relationship between different processes happening at different times.
Making time-lapse videos
Click Movie at the top right of the image window to create a time-lapse video of the sun’s surface. The default setting will create a video covering 24 hours, centered on the current observation time.
Alternatively, you can click Settings above the image window to make a video with duration of 3 hours to 1 week.
Under normal traffic conditions, it will take a minute or two to generate the video. But as more users call on this service, the wait times increase. In fact, in the days following the June 7 prominence eruption, the demand for video was so great that the Helioviewer Project had to literally erase the queue of requests as they stretched into days.
A pop up window will let you know when the video is ready. You will have the option of either downloading a copy or sharing it to YouTube.
The Recently shared window shows you a video recently uploaded by someone to YouTube,
Other sharing features
The Link and Screenshot features also allow you to share or store images or combinations of images created using Helioviewer.org.
Tomorrow: Explore solar images and video in depth with JHelioviewer.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ 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.
Did someone say wow? SDO captured this portrait of magnetic filaments on the sun on May 18, 2010.
Practically every week, space and astronomy bloggers get on their bony knees and thank the satellite gods for Solar Dynamics Observatory — or maybe they should. After all, since April 21 last year, little SDO has reliably produced mind-blowing beauty shots of our restless star in HD. This blog has posted about a dozen updates based on SDO material, which you can now surf on a special SDO archive pageon Geeked On Goddard.
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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.
Japan Earthquake
After the March 12 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, it’s as if the world collectively gasped — and then what followed was almost a feeling of disbelief as the harsh facts begin to register. Entire seaside communities erased from existence. . . tens of thousands of lives feared lost. . . giant ocean swells flooding the coastline. . . cars and houses looking like toys bobbing in the water. And then there are the satellite images, which provide a critical wide-angle perspective.
NASA’s Earth-observing fleet has helped to reveal the full scope and power of the catastrophe. As Mark Imhoff, the Terra satellite project scientist at Goddard, said in a report by West Virginia Public Broadcasting:
“It’s been heart wrenching seeing some of these images because the first set images that we got in on the day after the earthquake on March 12, even though the resolution from of the satellite wasn’t very good, the data from the Miser instrument at Jet Propulsion’s Laboratory showed that there were a large area of coastline that really weren’t there anymore and so you could really get an impression that a lot of villages and agricultural areas had really been severely impacted by the ocean.”
NASA released a web feature on March 17, five days after the quake, showing tsunami after-effects documented by Landsat 7.
NASA Earth Observatory has compiled a gallery of earthquake-related images from various NASA spacecraft, including EO-1, Terra, Aqua, and astronaut photos from the International Space Station.
As usual, EO’s in-depth captions provide context and explanations for the various destructive effects of the earthquake on coastal Japan. An even larger selection of imagery is available in this NASA web feature about the disaster.
New LRO Data
On March 15, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission released the final set of data from the mission’s exploration phase, along with the first measurements from its new life as a science satellite. The press release explains the details. The slideshow below takes a look back at some of the coolest imagery from the mission so far. All the images in the slideshow, and many more, are archived here on the NASA LRO website, which includes detailed captions.
Messenger Makes It
The third major story out of Goddard this week was the arrival in Mercury orbit of the Messenger spacecraft. After three spectacular fly-bys earlier (see slideshow below), Messenger is now in position to really dig into its science mission to reveal the nature and history of the first rock from the sun. An earlier post discusses some of the research being conducted on Mercury’s thin “exosphere” of atoms and ions wispily clinging within the planet’s gravity.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ 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.
At the top left of the image window, three drop-down menus allow you to choose the time and date at which you want to observe the sun, including latest, meaning “the most recent available.”
When you first visit Helioviewer.org, the Images menu setting will default to the most recent SDO image available from the spacecraft’s 
Mixing multiple images
Under normal traffic conditions, it will take a minute or two to generate the video. But as more users call on this service, the wait times increase. In fact, in the days following the 
