By Lora Koenig and Jessica Williams Hi, this is Lora. Sorry for not blogging for the past week or so but wow, we have been busy! On 17 November, I left my home in Silver Spring, MD, and spent 32 hours in transit before arriving in Christchurch, New Zealand. I flew from Regan National Airport […]
Some of the world’s largest companies suffered multimillion-dollar losses from flooding or drought in the past year, according to a November 16 report from The Guardian. Citing a study from the Carbon Disclosure Project, The Guardian stated that although too much or too little water can affect the profits of large companies, many of those companies […]
On the night of Nov. 17, 2011, NASA cameras captured two super-fast views of Leonid meteors. The first video below shows a Leonid from a NASA camera operated in Tullahoma, Tenn. Moving 73 times faster than a bullet fired from an M-16 rifle, the three-quarter inch meteor first started to burn up 71 miles above …
Read Full PostBy Lora Koenig Yesterday was an exciting day in the office. While I was downloading satellite data, answering e-mails and tying up loose ends before leaving for Antarctica, I was also closely following the NASA Airborne Sciences Flight Tracker and the flight path of the NASA DC-8 aircraft. The DC-8 is currently flying over Antarctica […]
The Orionid meteor shower is over, as Earth has finally left the wide stream of debris produced by Comet Halley. However, we are now encountering particles produced by Comet Encke, the second comet to be assigned a name (Halley was the first). This debris wake is much larger, lasting many weeks, causing the Taurid complex …
By Lora Koenig Two weeks ago, I traveled to Utah to help the team finalize planning for this season and to visit the ice core lab and our 2010 ice cores at BYU. The entire was there, except for Ludo, who was in Hawaii competing in a triathlon. (Ludo is not only a top scientist […]
The colors of emitted light within an aurora depend on the initial energy of the charged particles (mostly electrons) cascading into Earth’s atmosphere. Electrons with higher initial energies are able to penetrate deeper into the atmosphere, whereas those with lower initial energies lose all their energy at higher altitudes. The blue aurora emitted from low-altitude …
MSFC’s all sky meteor camera recorded this bright meteor last night (November 1st) at 9:04 pm CDT. Blazing across the sky at 40 miles per second (144,000 mph), the 1 inch visitor from space took only 3.3 seconds to go 132 miles, starting at a point just northeast of Athens, Alabama and burning up west …
