NASA Chief says Prayer our only hope if asteroid takes aim at Earth

NASA chief Charles Bolden has advice on how to handle a large asteroid headed toward Earth: Pray.

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FEATURE - A Quiet Interlude in Solar Max

Something unexpected is happening on the Sun. 2013 was supposed to be the year of “solar maximum,” the peak of the 11-year sunspot cycle. Yet 2013 has arrived and solar activity is relatively low. Sunspot numbers are well below their values from 2011, and strong solar flares have been infrequent. The quiet has led some observers to wonder if forecasters missed the mark.

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Nighttime View of Snow across the United States

Early on the morning of February 22, 2013, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite captured this nighttime view of heavy snow over the United States. 

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NASA Space Telescopes See Weather Patterns in Brown Dwarf

You think the weather where you are is bad?

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World From Space - Liège at Night

To paraphrase an old expression: “all roads lead to Liège.” Or at least you could get that impression from this astronaut photograph. The brightly lit core of the Liège urban area appears to lie at the center of a network of roadways—traceable by continuous orange lighting extending out into the rural and relatively dark Belgian countryside. For a sense of scale, the distance from image left to right is approximately 70 kilometers (43 miles). The region to the southeast of Verviers includes agricultural fields and forest; hence, it appears almost uniformly dark at night.

The image was taken using the European Space Agency’s nodding mechanism on the International Space Station (ISS), also known as the NightPod. This electro-mechanical mount system for digital cameras was designed to compensate for the motion of the ISS relative to the Earth. The primary goal was to take high-resolution, long-exposure digital imagery of the Earth from the ISS Cupola, particularly cities at night. While the official NightPod mission has been completed, the mechanism remains onboard for astronauts to use.

Liège is the third most populous metro area in Belgium, after Brussels and Antwerp. It includes 52 municipalities and the nearby city of Seraing. It is also an important economic center for the country, home to a diverse array of industries including mechanical, information and biotechnology; beer and chocolate; light armaments; and steel-making. The metropolitan area also boasts a wide array of cultural, historical, and artistic attractions that make it a popular destination for residents of France, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Astronaut photograph ISS034-E-5935 was acquired on December 8, 2012, with a Nikon D3S digital camera using a 180 millimeter lens, and is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations experiment and Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by the Expedition 34 crew. It has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Caption by William L. Stefanov, Jacobs/ESCG at NASA-JSC.

Instrument: ISS - Digital Camera

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Winter 2012-13 in Southern Greenland

As the year 2012 drew to a close, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this scene of sea ice, land ice, and fresh snow in southern Greenland. 

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