Space

A look at the happenings in outer space.

Solar weather and fire risk

|

I wonder how successful fire departments would be at putting out fires during severe solar weather. While it’s safe to say severe solar weather would require shutting down the power grid and would take offline most cellphone service and even radio communications, it’s not clear if it would it be strong enough nterfere with diesel engines or the largely gravity fed water systems.

It really depends on how strong the EMF is from the solar weather, how successful power companies are at grounding out power lines and even how dry the grass is under the certain to be arcing power lines. Peppers aren’t wrong to be very concerned with severe solar weather. It really would be very devastating in modern society.

NPR

|

New Effort To Clean Up Space Junk Reaches Orbit : NPR

A demonstration mission to test an idea to clean up space debris launched Monday morning local time from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Known as ELSA-d, the mission will exhibit technology that could help capture space junk, the millions of pieces of orbital debris that float above Earth.

The more than 8,000 metric tons of debris threaten the loss of services we rely on for Earth-bound life, including weather forecasting, telecommunications and GPS systems.

The temperature sine wave

|

If you think of the average high subtracted by the average high for the year in Albany as a sine wave, the phase goes positive around April 17th. ☀

The earth acts as a giant inductor for solar radiation as it takes time for the earth to heat or cold, which means that the average high temperature in Albany is 22 days out of sync with the position of the sun, making the high temperature departure curve is roughly 21.6 degrees out of phase from the sun although that’s not quite accurate around autumn as the sine wave that measures temperature departure is flatter than the position of the sun, because of the inductance of the earth and because not all heat from the earth is radiated back to space.

Landstat 1 and CORONA Satellite

|

Been digging through some of that Landstat 1 satellite photos from the early 1970s and also some of the declassified CORONA satellite images from the early 1960s on Earth Explorer.

While the images are pretty low resolution – they’re satellite from 50 years ago – they’re still fascinating to get a glimpse of the earth from outer space a half century ago. I want to download more the next time I’m at the library, maybe tomorrow.