No Ordinary Sight If you’re driving along Interstate 95 between Washington and Baltimore this July, don’t be alarmed if you see a large aircraft hurtling toward you from above. It’s not a a terrorist attack or a pilot dozing at the stick; it’s just NASA’s P-3B doing air quality research. The 117-foot plane is the workhorse […]
Discovered only a few days ago, the house-sized asteroid 2011 MD whizzed by at only 7,600 miles above Earth’s surface on June 27 at approximately 1:00 p.m. EDT. This approximately 10-yard rock came closer than many communications satellites and will rapidly recede over the next few hours and days. Rob Suggs, operating a Marshall Space Flight …
In the process of researching a feature for the Earth Observatory, I always come across fascinating tidbits that just don’t quite fit into my article. For instance, there’s this great carbon calculator tool from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Early during the development of the recent carbon cycle feature, I heard NASA scientist Peter Griffith speak to […]
Maunder’s Return This sounds like a straight-to-DVD sci-fi title. But the National Solar Observatory announcement last week that the Sun could be entering a grand minimum should probably be filed with cable TV’s “What Would Happen If…” documentaries. The last time the Sun went quiet for a long stretch – dubbed the Maunder Minimum — […]
Earth Observatory publishes many images of floods. The 2010 monsoon floods in Pakistan and 2011 floods in the Mississippi and Missouri basins have received a lot of coverage. But we don’t publish photo-like images of every flood, and many readers wonder why. The severe floods affecting China this month are a perfect example. So far, […]
Every once in a while we get satellite imagery that shows things that are hard to imagine, like floating rocks. It’s helpful to have a different persepctive, like this series of photographs collected by The Atlantic. Fantastic.
If you want to see global warming’s signature, look to the Arctic. Up north, the air is warming and the ice is melting. As all of that reflective ice goes away, the Arctic Ocean is soaking up more sunlight, further enhancing warming. Melting Arctic ice is also contributing significantly to sea level rise. For two […]
Not even clouds could obscure the International Space Station as it passed directly over Huntsville, Ala. on the evening of June 13 at 9:15 p.m. CDT. Shining as bright as the planet Venus, the space station took nearly four minutes to traverse the sky before disappearing in the murk to the Northeast. Its passage was …
Science writers and producers from across NASA recently sponsored an Earth Day video contest for the public. The theme was “The Home Frontier,” and the idea was to create videos that expressed what NASA Earth science means to you. Many people don’t realize that one of our agency’s most important missions is to study the […]
On Tornadoes and Climate The Joplin twister, which a GOES satellite observed on May 23, has promoted many people to wonder if climate change has fueled the recent spree of storms. The answer: possibly La Nina (Reuters), no (Agence France-Presse), and not likely (Climate Central). Should We Use Levees to Build in Floodplains? The swollen Mississippi raises […]
