By Ken Buesseler, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution /NORTHERN ATLANTIC OCEAN/ For those of us who grew up watching Gilligan's Island, we all know the fateful story of the "three-hour tour." Well, as this oceanographer knows, that TV storm is not that different from the weather we are facing out here in the North Atlantic on …
Scientists using data from NASA's Parker Solar Probe released a new collection of research papers in a special issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics on June 2, 2021.
By Miles Hatfield NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center About 50 miles up, Earth's atmosphere undergoes a fundamental change. It starts at the atomic level, affecting only one out of every million atoms (but with about 91 billion crammed in a pinhead-sized pocket of air, that's plenty). At that height, unfiltered sunlight begins cleaving atoms into …
By Zachary K. Erickson, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center / GREENBELT, MARYLAND / The ocean is full of eddies – swirling water masses that are the ocean equivalent of hurricanes. In comparison with their atmospheric counterparts, eddies are smaller, longer-lived, and far more numerous: at any given moment, well over 1,000 eddies exist throughout the …
By Sara Blumberg, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Inia Soto Ramos, Universities Space Research Association / GREENBELT, MARYLAND / Pandemics can change the plans of nearly everything, including ocean research. That's exactly what happened with EXPORTS. In 2019, the original North Atlantic Expedition along with its active research projects were cancelled. Despite the setback, …
By Sara Blumberg, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Inia Soto Ramos, Universities Space Research Association / GREENBELT, MARYLAND / When we talk about climate change, we tend to think of lush forests with giant trees that passively trap carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and use them for food in a process called photosynthesis. The …
NASA's Parker Solar Probe executed a small maneuver on May 15, 2021, that put the probe on newly optimized path for its next Venus gravity assist on Oct. 16.
Following a successful System Requirements Review/Mission Definition Review on April 6, 2020, the target launch readiness timeframe for NASA's PUNCH mission — short for Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere — has been moved from August 2022 to 2023 to accommodate the mission selection timeline.
Madeline Beck, Undergraduate Student in Environmental Science, Montana State University Being part of a NASA research team is an exciting experience! Knowing our work will correspond with further research endeavors and help validate remotely sensed measurements makes us feel like part of a greater effort and team. The research site is in a beautiful part …
Like so many other things, NASA's SnowEx 2021 looks a little different than usual this year. But one thing is business as usual, and that's the participation of undergraduate and graduate students. Students play a pivotal role in SnowEx, from suiting up for data collection to crunching the numbers afterward. The field sites become a …
