Solar Flare Issue continues to perplex Experts

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Here is the latest update on the solar flare issue the CPT has been tracking for years.

Starpulse.com

Frighteningly Enormous Solar Flare Update: White House Prepares For Coronal Mass Ejection, Potential Catastrophic Space Weather Events

Read more at http://www.starpulse.com/news/index.php/2015/12/29/frighteningly-enormous-solar-flare-upd#d23MpBDEYteAj1Hz.99

Brad Ryder 
12/29/2015 3:45am EST

While many people are looking back on pivotal events of 2015 -- famous deaths, terrorism, and the horse and pony Republican presidential debates -- a disturbing solar flare report is trending again. 

Recently, the White House made preparations for unpredictable and severe space weather events. And much of the clamor focuses on the possibility of a catastrophic coronal mass ejection striking Earth, citing an AOL latest news story. 

According to a video report, an intense solar flare narrowly missed a direct hit with Earth by a matter of days in 2012. NASA said an intense CME launched towards the planet at speeds of over 6 million miles per hour. 

At that speed, it would have taken the enormous flare 13 hours or so to reach our atmosphere. Consequently, the effects would have been catastrophic. As the news journalist says, it would have thrown us back to the Ice Age, so to speak, as many power grids would have been taken offline.

In October, the Obama Administration published the National Space Weather Action Plan, under the auspices of the National Science and Technology Council. The scope of the 44-page document is defined as such:

"With the objectives of improving understanding of, forecasting of, and preparedness for space-weather events (both the phenomena and their effects), the National Space Weather Strategy defines six strategic goals to prepare the Nation for near- and long-term space-weather effects."

 

NASA describes solar flares or coronal mass ejections as huge bursts of energy that launches materials from the sun. If the Earth's orbit takes it into the path of the solar mass; the results can be disastrous for a race highly dependent on electronic technologies.

One scientist painted an ominous picture of what could have occurred had the planet suffered a direct hit from the solar flare three years ago. 

"If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces." 

Here's putting things in perspective: Space meteorologists and teams of experts agree that the 2012 solar flare could have caused widespread damage and psychological effects to the tune of $2 trillion. Comparatively speaking, based on the sun's recent volatile activity, officials fear a cataclysmic solar flare that is 1,000 times larger. The costs are immeasurable. 

Doomsday thinkers say the White House report telegraphs a message that human life may be on borrowed time, that a space storm capable of mass extinction is brewing. No credible sources are reporting such extreme Earth events. However, one has to wonder why federal authorities are mulling the idea. 

This story is developing.

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Fireballs are falling to Earth this week!

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Business Insider

Mon, Nov 9, 2015, 11:44pm EST

Fireballs are falling to Earth this week in numbers we won't see for another 10 years — here's how to watch

By Jessica Orwig 6 hours ago

Keep your eyes peeled this week for some spectacular fireballs — extremely bright meteors — lighting up the sky, like this one caught on camera in Thailand November 2:

Right now, Earth is passing through Comet Encke's tail, generating the Taurid meteor shower in the process.

"The best time to view the Taurids is from midnight to 3 am local time," NASA wrote in a Reddit AMA. "There should be a handful per hour. Taurid rates are not high, but the ones you will see will be very bright."

The peak of the shower — when we can see the most meteors per hour — will be the evening of Wednesday, November 11. But Monday and Tuesday night are also a good time to sit back and look up, weather permitting.

The best way to watch any meteor shower is to get far away from city lights and look up, no special equipment required.

Look to Taurus

Meteor showers usually happen when Earth passes through a comet's stream of residual dust and debris in space.

The debris collides with our planet, is pulled toward Earth's center by gravity, and burns up in the atmosphere, producing bright streaks in the night sky that we sometimes refer to as falling stars.

Compared to other meteor showers, the Taurid meteors are relatively sluggish, colliding with Earth at speeds of about 65,000 mph — less than half the speed of the rapid Perseid meteors, which move at about 133,000 mph.

As a result, the Taurids appear to move slowly across the sky, so you can easily spot and track them with your naked eye.

Most of the meteors will likely appear to come from the direction of the constellation Taurus, hence the name Taurid meteors. Between the hours of midnight and 3 a.m., Taurus, shown at right, will be high in the night sky above the southern horizon.

You can use an app like Star Chart to figure out where Taurus will be in your night sky at peak viewing times.

Watch for fireballs

There are a couple of reasons why NASA suspects that this year's Taurid meteor shower will be worth watching.

First is that when the meteor shower peaks on the evening of Wednesday, November 11, the moon will be new.

So there will be no moonlight to outshine the meteors, and observers will have an especially dark night sky to enjoy the show. NASA estimates that during peak hours viewers can see between seven and 10 meteors an hour.

While those numbers don't stack up to the 100 meteors an hour you can sometimes see during the Perseid meteor shower in August, it's still worth watching since some of these meteors are likely to be brilliant fireballs.

That's one of the special features about the Taurid meteor shower: It often produces a number of fireballs, which are meteors defined by their brightness.

Fireballs are at least as bright as Venus, the brightest object in the night sky besides our moon. A single fireball can briefly light up a large chunk of the night sky, and therefore are some of the most exciting meteors to watch for.

2015 is a swarm year

Typically, the Taurid meteor shower is weak and, therefore, neglected by viewers. But this year's meteor shower is different.

About every 10 years, Earth passes through a particularly dense stream of Comet Encke's tail — leftover debris that the wind and heat from the sun blew off the comet's surface and into space. These years are called "swarm years."

The last time we saw a noteworthy Taurid meteor shower was in 2005, which means 2015 is also a swarm year and our lucky, once-in-a-decade opportunity for a good show with above-average meteor rates and more fireballs.
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NASA is baffled by these 8,000-year-old mystery structures in Kazakhstan

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Yet another of history's ancient mysteries yet to be solved.

• Andrew Griffin, The Independent

Nasa has released pictures of huge patterns drawn on the ground in Kazakhstan in an attempt to solve the mystery behind how they got there.

The huge formations are known as the Steppe Geoglyphs. Scientists have little idea how they were formed — but think that solving the mystery could lead to a huge change in how we understand early humans.

There are around 260 of the designs, which are carved into the ground and made out of piles of earth assembled into shapes that include squares, rings and swastika shapes. The oldest of them are thought to be about 8,000 years old.

The patterns were first spotted by a Kazakh enthusiast in 2007, who saw them on Google Earth. Dmitriy Dey, who works as an economist, was watching a programme about pyramids on the Discovery Channel and looked to see whether any such buildings were in Kazakhstan. When he looked, he found the strange structures.

But despite being known for almost 10 years, Kazakhstan hasn’t made much of the finds or worked to investigate them.

But Nasa is now joining the hunt to find out how exactly they got there. Nasa has released a range of satellite images, showing them photographed for the first time in an attempt to catalogue and detail them.

The land around the symbols was once a key destination for Stone Age tribes looking for places to hunt. But scientists would previously not have expected that such a population would have the time or the organisation to build and dig the huge symbols.

“The idea that foragers could amass the numbers of people necessary to undertake large-scale projects — like creating the Kazakhstan geoglyphs — has caused archaeologists to deeply rethink the nature and timing of sophisticated large-scale human organization as one that predates settled and civilized societies,” Persis B. Clarkson, an archaeologist at the University of Winnipeg, told the New York Times.

It isn’t clear whether the creations were created as an early form of art, or for a practical function. They could have been solar observatories, some speculate, in a way similar to the theories that surround other ancient constructions like Stonehenge.

Some of the strange theories have also proposed that the structures have something to do with aliens, or have been linked with Nazis because of the appearance of the swastika. While some of those can easily be rejected — the swastika was used in a wide range of contexts before Hitler — others are harder to dismiss because so little is known about how the finds came about.

Read the original article on The Independent. Copyright 2015. Follow The Independent on Twitter.

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NASA Brings Star Wars to reality with secret EM Drive Thruster - Warp Speed Breakthrough

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Star Wars Episode VII The Force Awakens to premiere December 18 while NASA cracks secret to interstellar space travel in labs!

 

NASA tests WARP DRIVE capable of blasting ships from Earth to the Moon in just FOUR hours

NASA is believed to be testing a Warp Drive which could one day blast a manned spaceship FASTER than the speed of light.

Tue, Nov 3, 2015, 10:31AM EST -

In a new round of testing, NASA confirms yet again that the 'impossible' EMdrive thruster works

By Rick Stella 

Engineer Roger Shawyer’s controversial EM Drive thruster jets back into relevancy this week, as a team of researchers at NASA’s Eagleworks Laboratories recently completed yet another round of testing on the seemingly impossible tech. Though no official peer-reviewed lab paper has been published yet, and NASA institutes strict press release restrictions on the Eagleworks lab these days, engineer Paul March took to the NASA Spaceflight forum to explain the group’s findings. In essence, by utilizing an improved experimental procedure, the team managed to mitigate some of the errors from prior tests — yet still found signals of unexplained thrust.

Isaac Newton should be sweating.

Flying in the face of traditional laws of physics, the EM Drive makes use of a magnetron and microwaves to create a propellantless propulsion system. By pushing microwaves into a closed, truncated cone and back towards the small end of said cone, the drive creates the momentum and force necessary to propel a craft forward. Because the system is a reactionless drive, it goes against humankind’s fundamental comprehension of physics, hence its controversial nature.

On the NASA spaceflight forums, March revealed as much as he could about the advancements that have been made with EM Drive and its relative technology. After apologizing for not having the ability to share pictures or the supporting data from a peer-reviewed lab paper, he starts by explaining (as straightforward as rocket science can get) that the Eagleworks lab successfully built and installed a 2nd generation magnetic damper which helps reduce stray magnetic fields in a vacuum chamber. The addition reduced magnetic fields by an order of magnitude inside the chamber, and also decreased Lorentz force interactions.

However, despite ruling out Lorentz forces almost entirely, March still reported a contamination caused by thermal expansion. Unfortunately, this reported contamination proves even worse in a vacuum (i.e. outer space) due in large part to its inherently high level of insulation. To combat this, March acknowledged the team is now developing an advanced analytics tool to assist in the separation of the contamination, as well as an integrated test which aims to alleviate thermally induced errors altogether.

While these advancements and additions are no doubt a boon for continued research of the EM Drive, the fact that the machine still produced what March calls “anomalous thrust signals” is by far the test’s single biggest discovery. The reason why this thrust exists still confounds even the brightest rocket scientists in the world, but the recurring phenomenon of direction-based momentum does make the EM Drive appear less a combination of errors and more like a legitimate answer to interstellar travel.

At this time, it’s unknown when Eagleworks Laboratories intends to officially publish its peer-reviewed paper, however, hearing of the EM Drive’s advancements from one of its top engineers bodes well for the future of this fascinating tech.
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Why Didn't NASA Warn us in Real Time about the near destruction?

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Why is it our own government continues to hide the truth from us but expects our support? This article released today, July 25, 2012, details how close the Earth came on July 23, 2012 to be so fried by solar flares it might have knocked us back into the 18th century, a time before electricity.

Since NASA has satellites monitoring solar flares in real time why was no warning given of the biggest solar storm in modern history that might have caused a worldwide calamity?  If they are hiding such crucial facts from us what other truths is NASA hiding from us?

Here is the account two years too late by NASA.

Earth survived near-miss from 2012 solar storm: NASA

Washington (AFP) - Back in 2012, the Sun erupted with a powerful solar storm that just missed the Earth but was big enough to "knock modern civilization back to the 18th century," NASA said.

The extreme space weather that tore through Earth's orbit on July 23, 2012, was the most powerful in 150 years, according to a statement posted on the US space agency website Wednesday.

However, few Earthlings had any idea what was going on.

"If the eruption had occurred only one week earlier, Earth would have been in the line of fire," said Daniel Baker, professor of atmospheric and space physics at the University of Colorado.

Instead the storm cloud hit the STEREO-A spacecraft, a solar observatory that is "almost ideally equipped to measure the parameters of such an event," NASA said.


Scientists have analyzed the treasure trove of data it collected and concluded that it would have been comparable to the largest known space storm in 1859, known as the Carrington event.

A mass of swirling plasma rose up above the Sun, twisted and turned for almost a day, then broke away.  It also would have been twice as bad as the 1989 solar storm that knocked out power across Quebec, scientists said.

"I have come away from our recent studies more convinced than ever that Earth and its inhabitants were incredibly fortunate that the 2012 eruption happened when it did," said Baker.

The National Academy of Sciences has said the economic impact of a storm like the one in 1859 could cost the modern economy more than two trillion dollars and cause damage that might take years to repair.

Experts say solar storms can cause widespread power blackouts, disabling everything from radio to GPS communications to water supplies -- most of which rely on electric pumps.

They begin with an explosion on the Sun's surface, known as a solar flare, sending X-rays and extreme UV radiation toward Earth at light speed.

Hours later, energetic particles follow and these electrons and protons can electrify satellites and damage their electronics.


Next are the coronal mass ejections, billion-ton clouds of magnetized plasma that take a day or more to cross the Sun-Earth divide.

These are often deflected by Earth's magnetic shield, but a direct hit could be devastating.

There is a 12 percent chance of a super solar storm the size of the Carrington event hitting Earth in the next 10 years, according to physicist Pete Riley, who published a paper in the journal Space Weather earlier this year on the topic.

His research was based on an analysis of solar storm records going back 50 years.

"Initially, I was quite surprised that the odds were so high, but the statistics appear to be correct," said Riley.

"It is a sobering figure."      
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Discovery Last Ride Ends NASA Space Flights

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Spectacular Flight over Nation's Capitol Slams Door into Space

President Obama decided the NASA Space Program was unnecessary and he terminated over 30 years of American dominance in space.  We now have to hitch rides on Russian rockets to even reach the International Space Station.

Today was bittersweet for space enthusiasts as Discovery took it's last flight mounted atop NASA's Shuttle Carrier Aircraft flying from Florida to the nation's capitol where it made a rare flight over the Mall at the Capitol.  It is to be housed forever in the Smithsonian Space exhibit by Dulles Airport.

The Space Shuttle Discovery is the longest-serving orbiter. It was flown 39 times from 1984 through 2011 — more missions than any of its sister ships — spending altogether 365 days in space. Want to know more about the Discovery?

• In 2000, the Discovery flew 100th shuttle mission.

• Discovery launched on its final flight to the International Space Station on the STS-133 mission February 24, 2011.

• Three Hubble Space Telescope flights (1990 deployment and 2 servicing visits, 1997, 1999).

• Two flights were to the Russian space station Mir (1995, 1998).

• Thirteen flights went to the International Space Station (1999-2011).

• It orbited the Earth 5,830 times and traveled 148,221,675 miles.

A bit more trivia about the Space Shuttle Discovery:

The shuttle was named after other famous ships of exploration, such as the HMS Discovery which accompanied English explorer James Cook and Henry Hudson’s ship Discovery, which he used to look for the Northwest Passage.

A rather famous fictional spaceship from Stanley Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is named Discovery One. You may not remember that, but I bet you remember the name of the onboard computer: HAL 9000.

In 1998, Discovery carried astronaut (and senator) John Glenn, who was 77 at the time, back in space, giving him the record of oldest person to go into space. Incidentally, this also made him the third seated politician to fly in space.

Utah Senator Jake Garn is the first sitting member of the United States Congress to fly in space. He was the payload specialist onboard Discovery’s STS-51-D mission in 1985. The second seated politician to fly in space is then Florida Representative (now Senator) Bill Nelson, who flew in 1986 onboard the Space Shuttle Columbia.

Jake Garn was also the world’s first space tourist. Actually, was also a guinea pig: his mission was to be subjected to tests designed to increase understanding of space motion sickness. He had motion sickness so severe that NASA named the "Garn scale" of space sickness after him. Upon his return to Congress, his Senate colleagues and promptly called him by his new nickname: "Barfin’ Jake" (bestowed by cartoonist Garry Trudeau in his Doonesbury strip).

After his return, Jake Garn co-authored a fiction called Night Launch (published in 1989), in which terrorists take over the Space Shuttle Discovery during the first NASA-USSR space shuttle flight.

President Bill Clinton watched John Glenn’s return to space from the Kennedy Space Center, making him the first (and only) US President to attend a Shuttle launch.

Discovery also carried the first (and so far only) member of royalty in space: Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, grandson of King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia.

Space Shuttle Discovery was the first shuttle to fly after both the

Challenger and Columbia disasters in 1988 and 2003, respectively.

It’s not all fun and science onboard the Space Shuttle Discovery: it has carried many classified payloads. In one such mission in 1985, the shuttle crew reportedly launched a secret satellite for the Department of Defense and the National Reconnaissance Office called Magnum. Or so we heard.

Discovery was the shuttle that launched the Hubble Space Telescope and the Ulysses probe (designed to study the sun).

In 1999, Mission Specialist Daniel T. Barry brought along his favorite game, the first copy of computer game in space, StarCraft. The game CD now resides in Blizzard’s home office after orbiting the Earth 153 times and traveling 3.5 million nautical miles.

It also was the first shuttle to "recover" communication satellites which orbit went bad because of motor malfunctions. In 1984, Space Shuttle Discover successfully captured Palapa B-2 and Westar 6 satellites. After recovering the satellites, crewmember Dale Gardner then posed for this famous picture:

The external tank of the shuttle had to be repaired in 1995, due to damage done by birds! NASA discovered that Northern Flicker Woodpeckers pecked about 200 holes in the foam insulation on Discovery’s fuel tank.

They promptly installed noisemakers and physical deterrents to scare off the woodpeckers. Also, they added a permanent human "woodpecker spotters" at launch pads around the clock!

In this mission, Discovery also carried Sweden’s first astronaut, Christer Fuglesang.

Farewell old friend...
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Sun fires off 2 huge solar flares, could impact weather on Earth

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Fox News

Written By Tariq Malik

Published March 07, 2012

Space.com

The sun unleashed a cosmic double whammy Tuesday, March 6, erupting with two major flares to cap a busy day of powerful solar storms. One of the flares is the most powerful solar eruption of the year, so far.

Both of the huge flares ranked as X-class storms, the strongest type of solar flares the sun can have. They followed several weaker, but still powerful, sun storms on Tuesday and came just days after another major solar flare on Sunday night.

The first big solar storm was also the most powerful one, ranking as an X5.4-class flare after erupting at 7:02 p.m. EST (0002 March 7 GMT), according to an alert from the Space Weather Prediction Center operated by the National Weather Service. It is the strongest solar flare yet for 2012.

March 6, 2012: NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captures the sun as it unleashed an X5.4-class solar flare at 7:04 p.m. EST. The flare appears as the bright spot in the upper left. (NASA/SD)

The second event occurred just over an hour later, reaching a maximum strength of X1.3.

Several space-based observatories witnessed the solar flares, including NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory and the agency's Stereo-B spacecraft. The sun-watching observatories spotted huge clouds of charged particles — called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs — erupting from the solar flares.

"First-look data from Stereo-B are not sufficient to determine if the cloud is heading for Earth," astronomer Tony Phillips wrote on his website Spaceweather.com, which monitors space weather events. "Our best guess is 'probably, yes, but not directly toward Earth.' A glancing blow to our planet's magnetosphere is possible on March 8th or 9th." [Worst Solar Storms in History]

According to Phillips, the big X5.4 solar flare erupted from the giant active sunspot AR1429, which was also responsible for the major sun storm on Sunday.

When aimed directly at Earth, X-class solar flares can endanger astronauts and satellites in orbit, interfere with satellite communications and damage power grids on Earth. They can also amplify the Earth's display of northern and southern lights, also known as auroras. Charged particles from the solar storms can interact with Earth's upper atmosphere, resulting in a glow that is typically visible to observers at high northern or southern latitudes.

Astronomers rank solar flares by strength using five categories: A, B, C, M and X. The A-class flares are the weakest sun storms, while the X-class events are the most powerful solar flares.

This ranking system was designed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and resembles the Richter scale used for earthquakes in that each category is 10 times stronger than the one before it, NASA officials have said. So a B-class solar flare is 10 times stronger than an A-class event, while a C-class solar storm releases 10 times more energy than B-class flare (or 100 times more energy than an A-class event).

The categories are also broken down into subsets, from 1 to 9, to pinpoint a solar flare's strength. Only X-class solar flares have subcategories that go higher than 9. The most powerful solar flare on record occurred in 2003 and was estimated to be an X28 on the solar flare scale, NASA officials said.

Tuesday's X-class solar flares followed a string of other eruptions that included M-class and C-class events, space weather officials said. Both of the day's X-class sun storms were stronger than the X1.1 solar flare of March 5.

Prior to this week, the only huge solar flare of 2012 occurred on Jan. 27, when the sun unleashed an X1.7-class eruption.

The sun is currently going through an active phase of its 11-year weather cycle. The current cycle is known as Solar Cycle 24 and is expected to reach its peak level of activity in 2013, NASA officials have said.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/03/07/sun-fires-off-2-huge-solar-flares-could-impact-weather-on-earth/#ixzz1oRbxh2lf
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