Yesterday’s Image of the Day — Ocean Revealed — elicited an interesting response from Norman Kuring, a NASA oceanographer who frequently contributes to the Earth Observatory. He notes: “There have indeed been a number of studies that exploit sunglint for ocean research since Paul Scully-Power made his statement. However, I disagree with the follow-on sentence that, “his […]
New Status: H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV)-4 Status: HTV’s forward Reaction Control System (RCS)-A oxidizer latch valve exhibited two recurrences of the unexpected “closed” indication during the past 24 hours. HTV continues to fly on the RCS-B string with RCS-A available as a backup. If this occurs on the RCS-B string during free flight, Japan Aerospace …
Wildfires follow a simple but dangerous equation: Hotter, dryer conditions + more people in the world = a greater likelihood of ferocious wildfires threatening lives and property. Fires in the western United States are burning earlier, longer and with more intensity, as shown by a decades-long record from ground surveys and NASA satellites. How much of […]
New Status: Advanced Colloids Experiment (ACE)-1: FE-6 Nyberg mixed the 6th of 10 wells for the ACE-1 experiment. ACE-1 is the first in a series of microscopic imaging investigations of materials which contain small colloidal particles which have the specific characteristic of remaining evenly dispersed and distributed within the material. This investigation takes advantage of …
New Status: H-II Transfer Vehicle 4 (HTV4) Status: Yesterday HTV4 telemetry indicated that the Reaction Control System (RCS)-A latching valve was closed unexpectedly. Ground teams tested the latching valve today and determined that both the latch and RCS-A are working nominally. They concluded that the anomaly was a transient in the switch that detects the …
The “Perfect” Palette Despite the near-ubiquity of the rainbow palette—which distorts patterns in the underlying data—the basics of using color to represent numerical data are well-established. This 1823 map by W. C. Woodbridge is an early example of the use of colors to represent numbers—in this case more qualitative than quantitative. The rainbow palette is […]
Introduction The use of color to display data is a solved problem, right? Just pick a palette from a drop-down menu (probably either a grayscale ramp or a rainbow), set start and end points, press “apply,” and you’re done. Although we all know it’s not that simple, that’s often how colors are chosen in the […]
New Status: H-II Transfer Vehicle 4 (HTV4) Status: HTV4 launched successfully Saturday August 3rd at 2:48 PM CDT from Tanegashima Space Center, Japan. Capture and berthing are planned for Friday August 9th at 6:30 AM CDT. Over the weekend, Reaction Control System (RCS) and Main Engines thruster testing and leak checks were performed on both …
NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg took this photograph of moonrise and sunrise over Earth’s limb on August 4, 2013. In a tweet, Nyberg noted that she also saw Jupiter and Mercury as she looked out from the International Space Station, but the glare of the Sun’s light hid them in her photo. When astronomer and Slate blogger Phil Plait […]
New Status: InSPACE-3 Operations: Flight Engineer (FE)-6 Nyberg performed her first two test sessions of InSPACE-3 today. InSPACE-3 obtains data on fluids containing ellipsoid-shaped particles that change the physical properties of the fluids in response to magnetic fields. InSPACE-3 collects and records data on fluids containing ellipsoid-shaped particles that change the physical properties of the …
