NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

October 15, 2024

Animation: Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS Tails Prediction

How bright and strange will the tails of Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS become? The comet has brightened dramatically over the few weeks as it passed its closest to the Sun and, just three days ago, passed its closest to the Earth. C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) became of the brightest comets of the past century over the past few days, but was unfortunately hard to see because it was so nearly superposed on the Sun. As the comet appears to move away from the Sun, it is becoming a remarkable sight – but may soon begin to fade. The featured animated video shows how the comet's tails have developed, as viewed from Earth, and gives one prediction about how they might further develop. As shown in the video, heavier parts of the dust tail that trails the comet have begun to appear to point in nearly the opposite direction from lighter parts of the dust tail as well as the comet's ion tail, the blue tail that is pushed directly out from the Sun by the solar wind.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

OpenET: Balancing Water Supply and Demand in the West

Oct 14, 2024

At the end of 2022, 65 percent of the Western United States was in severe drought, the result of a two decades long mega drought in the Colorado River Basin that had captured headlines around the world.

However, it was flooding, not drought, that was making headlines when we began our research for this story about OpenET, a revolutionary new online platform geared towards helping farmers and water managers monitor and reduce water use in watersheds where supplies were not keeping up with demand.

The start of 2023 brought flooding to many counties in California, leaving 68 percent of the state with suddenly little to no drought.

And caused Forrest Melton, the NASA Project Scientist for OpenET and Associate Program Manager for agriculture and water resources with the NASA Earth Action program, to pause our video interview after a tree fell down outside his Bay Area home on a rainy day in March, 2023.

Coming online again after calling the fire department, Melton didn’t seem all too optimistic that the wet conditions would last.

“California tends to swing between the two extremes of drought and flood,” Melton said.

He referenced the 2016/17 winter which had particularly high precipitation but was followed by dry conditions during the following years, before the relief brought by the heavy rains, and flooding, in early 2023.

According to NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System it will take more than one wet winter to replenish groundwater in many parts of the western United States.

Groundwater levels across the California Central Valley and many parts of the Ogallala Aquifer continue to decline.

The need for better water management remains essential, and yet the data necessary to support new approaches has not been broadly available.

Enter the OpenET project, a multi-disciplinary, collaborative effort to make satellite-based evapotranspiration (ET) data available to the public.

Melton describes the project as providing invaluable and scientifically robust data at all scales, “that can be used to support day to day decision making and long range planning to try to solve some really long standing and important water management challenges in the West.”

Contents

What is Evapotranspiration?

What makes OpenET different?

Bridging the Gap Between Farmers and Resource Managers

Water Beyond Borders

cont.

https://www.nasa.gov/general/openet-balancing-water-supply-and-demand-in-the-west/

Comet C/2023 A3 brightens SOHO’s week

15/10/2024

From 7 until 13 October 2024, ESA/NASA’s SOHO spacecraft recorded Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS), the second brightest comet it has ever seen.

Meanwhile, large amounts of material were being spewed out by the Sun (covered in the centre), and planet Mercury is visible to the left.

Comet C/2023 A3 was seen for the first time early last year.

It most likely came from the distant Oort cloud, and the last time this comet flew through the inner Solar System (if ever) was at least 80 000 years ago.

The comet reached an estimated peak brightness just beyond –4 magnitude.

(The more negative the visual magnitude value, the brighter the object.)

Of the more than 5000 comets SOHO has seen flying past the Sun, only Comet C/2006 P1 (McNaught) was brighter, with a visual magnitude of –5.5.

SOHO’s location between the Sun and Earth gave it a front-row seat, but the same comet has been visible from Earth every evening since 12 October 2024.

Throughout October, as the comet moves farther away from the Sun, it will gradually grow fainter and rise higher up in the western sky.

The week that SOHO watched Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS was also a wild one in terms of space weather.

The Sun unleashed no less than 4 X-class flares (the highest intensity type of flare), 28 medium-intensity M-class flares, and 31 coronal mass ejections – the latter being visible as white clouds of material in the video.

All this activity led to two geomagnetic storms on Earth, resulting in beautiful auroras lighting up the night sky.

SOHO, short for Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, is a joint ESA-NASA mission to study the Sun.

For almost 29 years now, it has been watching the Sun itself as well as the much fainter light coming from the Sun’s outer atmosphere, called the solar corona.

The data shown in this video were taken by the LASCO C2 (red) and C3 (blue) coronagraph instruments.

The comet is so bright that it partially saturated SOHO’s sensor. Click here for a differently processed video where more of the comet’s structure is visible.

The comet appears to slow down around 10 October because the image cadence of SOHO’s cameras was increased.

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2024/10/Comet_C_2023_A3_brightens_SOHO_s_week2

Navigation tech for the future of mobility

14/10/2024

In the rapidly evolving landscape of mobility, global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) play a foundational role.

They power personal navigation (such as maps and directions on smartphones), transport of people and cargo, logistics and autonomous systems across land, air and sea.

We are becoming increasingly reliant on navigation technology.

According to EUSPA’s latest Market Report, shipment of GNSS devices for road and automotive increased from around 50 million in 2012 to more than 125 million in 2022.

Shipment of in-vehicle systems tripled over the same period.

And this dependency will continue to grow. By 2033, the installed base of GNSS devices in road and automotive applications is expected to reach nearly 1.4 billion units, double the current figure, without even accounting for devices in planes, drones, trains and ships.

Can we picture a world without GNSS? Just a single day’s outage would trigger widespread disruption in mobility and transport.

Inaccurate vehicle navigation systems would lead to inefficient routing and congestion, while bus and train services would face delays and interruptions.

Flights would be cancelled and air navigation safety could be compromised.

Taxi services would be disrupted, and smart traffic lights and tolling systems would degrade.

It would have serious implications for emergency response times for services like ambulances and fire departments.

The economic consequences would be staggering: a UK government report estimated a potential £1 billion loss per day from a GNSS outage in the country.

The future: PNT to enable automation and autonomy

With significant technological advancements and declining costs of artificial intelligence (AI), computing and enhanced connectivity, the deployment, testing and commercialisation of autonomous vehicles is rapidly increasing.

Beyond passenger cars, autonomous technologies are being adopted in public and cargo transport.

Uncrewed systems such as flying taxis, delivery robots and commercial drones also have the potential to reshape mobility as we know it.

Prototypes are already a reality, suggesting this future is not far off.

As autonomous driving and advanced air mobility continue to evolve, the navigation and positioning technology behind them must ensure total availability and reliability as well as high accuracy in all environments.

Beyond conventional satellite navigation, some of the technologies and concepts that support this future are:

Hybrid positioning systems: GNSS integrated with onboard systems such as Inertial Measurement Units, LiDAR, RADAR and video cameras ensure uninterrupted positioning in rural areas with poor terrestrial coverage.

Satellite communications will be essential to maintain 100% availability.

Vehicle-to-everything communicationtechnology: will allow autonomous vehicles to communicate with infrastructure and other vehicles.

This will enable vehicles to receive correction data and 'see' beyond their immediate surroundings, such as around corners, improving safety and efficiency.

Positioning performance enhancements: GNSS will be complemented by satellites in low Earth orbit and terrestrial-based systems to improve positioning resilience, availability and accuracy, allowing centimetre-level precision, crucial for applications like lane-keeping and real-time decision-making.

These technologies used together constitute Advance Driver Assistance applications or what is known as connected, cooperative automated mobility.

cont.

https://www.esa.int/Applications/Satellite_navigation/Navigation_tech_for_the_future_of_mobility

Ciseres: AI-powered satellites for rapid disaster response  

15/10/2024

This week, at the International Aeronautics Congress in Milan, ESA officially kicked off a new project called Ciseres, a small satellite mission designed to significantly improve crisis response times using artificial intelligence (AI).

Part of ESA's Civil Security from Space (CSS) programme, Ciseres aims to enhance satellite capabilities to alert first responders and government officials within minutes of the occurrence of a disaster – such as floods, fires, landslides.

The project is led and co-financed by Deimos, a European space tech company specialising in small satellite missions.

Satellites play a crucial role in disaster management.

They offer a view of affected areas from above and maintain communication links when terrestrial (ground) infrastructure is compromised or in remote areas where networks can’t reach.

However, satellites collect vast amounts of data from various sensors and input, which has traditionally been challenging to process and transmit quickly.

This often delays critical information from reaching emergency responders.

AI filters and compresses crucial data only for faster transmission 

Ciseres addresses this challenge by directly integrating AI into the process.

The AI acts as a sophisticated filter, scanning the enormous amounts of data processed by the satellite at all times to identify the most relevant information.

It then compresses this data at high speed, allowing for the transmission of essential details to the right people within just a few minutes. 

“By enabling AI-based processing directly on board the satellite, the Ciseres end-to-end solution will provide users with rapid 'actionable' information right away,” said Laurent Jaffart, ESA Director of Connectivity and Secure Communications.

"We’re bringing New Space – in the form of AI, small sats, constellations, high resolution, optical and radar – to the last mile delivery in satellite communications.”  

ESA has partnered with three European companies for Ciseres, harnessing their technological capabilities to explore how best to utilise AI for disaster response.  

Deimos, an end-to-end small satellite mission provider, will offer expertise in Edge AI and machine learning operations. 

Skylabs, a satellite computer firm, will provide the on-board computer and high-performance computing capabilities. 

GINA, an emergency response software-as-a-service provider, will develop the Earth Observation platform. 

While Ciseres is a European initiative, its potential impact extends globally. The project aligns with international efforts to improve early warning systems and disaster resilience worldwide.

As climate change increases the frequency and severity of natural disasters, AI-empowered satellite technology can address complex, time-sensitive issues on a global scale.

“When disaster strikes, it is critical not only to provide available situational awareness as fast as possible, but also to rapidly task satellites to change their planned data collection schedules to ensure updated situational information can be acquired and delivered to crisis responders on the timescales they require.

The Ciseres developments represent an important advancement in this respect,” said Simonetta Cheli, ESA Director of Earth Observation.  

“AI-powered satellite systems will redefine how we respond to disasters.

By processing critical data directly on-board, Ciseres enables first responders to make faster, life-saving decisions.

This project underscores Europe's leadership in space innovation, and we’re proud to be at the forefront of this revolution,” said Simone Centuori, CEO of Deimos. 

Ciseres is part of the Serenity project, which is a ground network of interconnected hubs that offer seamless access to space and ground resources for enhanced crisis response.

These projects sit within ESA's Civil Security from Space programme. 

Third-party applications are welcome to join the Ciseres environment and take advantage of the shared Earth observation data.

If your organisation deals with government agencies, first responders and/or critical infrastructure operators, visit [link] to find out more.

https://www.esa.int/Applications/Connectivity_and_Secure_Communications/Ciseres_AI-powered_satellites_for_rapid_disaster_response

Monster black hole is a 'cosmic Michael Myers' killing a star and brutally attacking another

October 14, 2024

With Halloween approaching, it's the perfect time for a horror film and NASA's Chandra space telescope has spotted a doozy.

The X-ray telescope saw a cosmic serial killer remorselessly ripping apart a star and then targeting its next stellar victim.

Like a cosmic Michael Myers, the unstoppable killer of the Halloween horror franchise, the supermassive black hole in a galaxy 210 million light-years from Earth specializes in gory demises.

The black hole in the center of AT2019qiz is hurling the remains of the star, which it previously destroyed, at another star or possibly a smaller stellar-mass black hole orbiting it.

This stellar horror movie was first observed by the Zwicky Transient Facility, which saw the violent death of a star due to the gravitational influence of this black hole in a so-called "tidal disruption event" or "TDE" in 2019.

Like all the best horror movies, astronomers were eager to catch the sequel, with NASA's Chandra X-ray Space Telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, and other telescopes catching the next installment in 2023.

This new installment in this gruesome tale involved the remains of the destroyed star, which have settled around this killer black hole like a graveyard, forming a flattened cloud of stellar material.

This stellar wreckage has extended to the point that an orbiting object repeatedly collides with it as it circles around the supermassive black hole of AT2019qiz.

These collisions cause flashes of X-rays seen by Chandra.

"Imagine a diver repeatedly going into a pool and creating a splash every time she enters the water," team leader Matt Nicholl of Queen’s University Belfast, United Kingdom, said in a statement.

"The star in this comparison is like the diver, and the disk is the pool, and each time the star strikes the surface, it creates a huge 'splash' of gas and X-rays.

As the star orbits around the black hole, it does this over and over again."

The team's research was published on Wednesday (Oct. 9) in the journal Nature and is also available on the paper repository arXiv.

TDEs like the one that started this gruesome series of events happen when unfortunate stars venture too close to supermassive black holes.

These cosmic titans, found at the heart of all large galaxies, have masses equivalent to millions or billions of suns.

And with such tremendous masses come incredible gravitational influences.

When a star gets too close to a supermassive black hole, the gravity is so different at its closest and furthest points from the black hole that powerful tidal forces are generated within the star.

This causes that doomed stellar body to be stretched vertically and simultaneously squashed horizontally.

This process, colorfully called "spaghettification," turns that star into a long cosmic noodle of plasma.

The black hole can't directly slurp down this stellar pasta because it still has angular momentum.

This causes the stellar wreckage to form into a swirling flattened cloud of plasma around the black hole that gradually feeds it, called an "accretion disk."

Astronomers have observed many of these TDEs, which are marked by a single powerful flash of light as the star is ripped apart.

Recently, they have also turned up related events that flash in X-rays more than once, repeating multiple times.

These supermassive black hole-centered "quasi-periodic eruptions" had been theorized to be connected to orbiting bodies diving through accretion disks, but this is the first hard evidence of that connection.

"There had been feverish speculation that these phenomena were connected, and now we’ve discovered the proof that they are," team member Dheeraj Pasham of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) said in the statement.

"It’s like getting a cosmic two-for-one in terms of solving mysteries."

This evidence came in the form of repeated X-ray bursts from AT2019qiz, which Chandra spotted occurring roughly once every 48 hours.

Data from Hubble collected simultaneously allowed scientists to determine the width of the accretion disk around the supermassive black hole, revealing it had spread out enough to allow any object orbiting the black hole for a period of about a week or less to slam through the disk and cause eruptions.

Astronomers can now use these results to search for more quasi-periodic eruptions, which represent killer black holes attacking fresh victims with stellar wreckage.

https://www.space.com/monster-black-hole-cosmic-michael-myers-star-killer

https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.02181

SpaceX makes Starlink internet service free for people hit by hurricanes Helene and Milton

October 15, 2024

SpaceX is offering free access to its Starlink broadband services for the rest of 2024 in areas affected by hurricanes Helene and Milton.

Starlink is a satellite internet service developed by SpaceX. It uses a constellation of thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit to provide high-speed internet access to users on the ground.

In the wake of Hurricane Helene and Milton, SpaceX has distributed more than 10,000 Starlink kits, which include the receiver that is required to access the service, waived monthly fees and enabled emergency alerts over cellular networks in affected areas.

Hurricane Helene made landfall in northwest Florida as a Category 4 storm on Sept. 26, followed shortly by Hurricane Milton on Oct. 9, which made landfall along Florida's west-central Gulf Coast as a Category 3 storm.

The back-to-back hurricanes caused catastrophic flooding, food and water shortages and widespread power and communication outages.

​​"For those impacted by hurricanes Helene or Milton, Starlink service is now free through the end of the year to help with response and recovery efforts," SpaceX announced Friday (Oct. 11) in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

The company's decision follows plans to initially provide free service for 30 days in areas hit by Hurricane Helene.

However, the subsequent impacts of Hurricane Milton led to dropping the monthly service fee (normally $120 per month) for the rest of the year.

Free access to the Starlink internet service is being offered to new and existing residential customers across impacted areas of Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia.

A Starlink receiver is required, which costs $349 and can be purchased online or from an authorized retailer such as Best Buy or Home Depot, according to a customer support article.

"At the end of the year, we will move you to a paid Residential subscription, tied [to] the location you are using it in at that time," the support article states. "We will reevaluate as necessary based on conditions in the area."

In addition to waiving the monthly fee, SpaceX also worked with T-Mobile to enable basic text messaging (SMS), allowing users in areas affected by the recent hurricanes to communicate with friends and family, text 911 and receive emergency alerts.

"If a phone connects to a Starlink satellite, it will have 1 to 2 bars of signal and show 'T-Mobile SpaceX' in the network name," SpaceX shared in another post on X.

"Users may have to manually retry text messages if they don't go through at first, as this is being delivered on a best-effort basis. The service works best outdoors, and occasionally works indoors near a window."

SpaceX began launching Starlink internet satellites into orbit in 2019 with the goal of creating a megaconstellation.

The network has steadily expanded, with more than 6,000 operational Starlink satellites in orbit above Earth.

https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-free-2024-hurricane-helene-milton