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NASA Notices New, Nasty Solar Storm Type
saskboy writes "Solar Storms generally aren't this bad, but in January unique conditions led to a "proton superhighway" that bombarded earth with fast moving protons that could have harmed astronauts caught without a radiation shield.
"Scant minutes after the January 20th [2005] flare, a swarm of high-speed protons surrounded Earth and the Moon. Thirty minutes later, the most intense proton storm in decades was underway."
Listen to the story here.
Archives from the January storms are also available from SpaceWeather.com"
It's poor form to FP my own article, so I let you do it ;-)
And Al Gore didn't do this no. Unless he invented protons, or the Sun.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
It's headed toward Earth... and will hit... tomorrow. Have a great day!
You mean we had the opportunity for a new generation of super-heros due to radiation bombardment and we totally missed it? In the age of manned private space flight, I'm disappointed.
The protons...they just kept...swarming and surrounding me...The protons!....The horror! Babies were screaming! Children were crying! Animals were being slaughtered! THE PROTOOOOONNNSS!!!.. -shudders-
nothing.can.stop.me.now
When the Fantastic Four come out in July, we will see the dangers of being out in space without a radiation shield.
This is just another sign of mankind's effect on the solar system. We need to stop polluting outer space, or we can count on rapid climate change and other phenomena that will destroy life in our solar system.
I heard that 5 people aboard the ISS got caught in it. One guy's skin got all orange and hard, but his muscles got MAJORLY enhanced. One guy got increased flexibility, tothe point that he could bend and extend his bones/muscles as much as he wanted. Another guy was affected so much he could start fires on the outside of his body. An unfortunate woman caught in this stream turned invisible. However, the worst one was a guy who suffered a severe personality loss. He was said to be just plain mean and nasty. And his nerves for some reason discharged electrical shocks many times their normal size.
I mean, couldn't NASA have chosen someone else than Quentin to read this report ?
It feels like a pulp fiction travesty, really...
What... the... fuck
No, seriously. What the fuck? Really... what the FUCK?
Is this a sarcastic jab at hippies? Are you being serious? Trolling? This post makes so little sense it has left my frail geek mind in a state of disarray. It's a lonely, scary place in there right now.
What the fuck?
Notice how this is modded Offtopic on slashdot--not Troll of Flamebait.
when my flux capacitor wouldn't charge, right around that time, must have been all those protons just swarming and swarming around us.
I heard that 5 people aboard the ISS got caught in it. One guy's skin got all orange and hard, but his muscles got MAJORLY enhanced.
I didn't realize Hulk Hogan was onboard the ISS!
I understand the Sun's anger towards us, I would be angry to if self-conceited monkeys kept polluting my system, but does it need to kill off all humans with radiation?
--
When we look back on all we accomplished we think, oops.
I don't preview or spellcheck.
"Err. Wait. Sorry this is slashdot, I guess large muscley women won't have much of an effect on us, other than having large muscley mothers."
That won't affect us? Now they can kick us out of the basement.
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A sig should be wise.
I don't preview or spellcheck.
...you're saying that trolling is caused by proton storms?
It was a bit over the top humor, but it makes a point. Look at almost every slashdot thread. Someone invariably tries to tie in either a nefarious, sinister plot. Not every event that affects us is caused by a) George Bush b) Republicans c) Greenpeace d) Democrates e) Global Warming e) Political Payoffs f) Fox Network
Sometimes we need to be reminded of this, and while the post wasn't of the caliber of Swift's "A Modest Proposal", it tried to get a point across.
Let it be.
That explains the "Alien Invasion" sequel playing out on Capitol Hill that afternoon.
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make install -not war
I blame global warming.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
welcome our new proton overlords!
What the flux is going on?
One thing is for sure, that man was NOT born to be a narrator.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Sun (talking to us): Take this bastards !!!
[proton storm super-combo level 4]
Humans: Argh, noooooooooo !
The Goggles! They do nothing!
-666! YOU ARE TEH FUNNAY!
Everytime something like this happens there are unusual weather patterns later on in the season, and then people scream bloody murder that it is global warming and demand immediate and overwhelming regulations be put in place right now.
I'm writing this for the record because I just know I'm gonna here this a few months down the road.
The article expains how lousy amateur radio propagation in the HF bands can occur when www.spaceweather.com or WWV says that something unpredicted is happening and they are caught off guard. Its rather amazing. Thats why its important to sign up for their telephone call and email alert service. Rob N3FT
I know you're joking, but it's only a matter of time before someone "blames" this on cassini or other "nukes-in-space" projects.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
It would be really cool to be able to have data from the entire Solar surface instead of our currently limited view. It would also be handy to know if a solar storm was brewing on another part of the Sun and was likely to let loose when that portion of the Sun rotated to face Earth.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
I thought this was pretty interesting, here's a picture on January 20th, then another picture from February 20th.
You do know that SOHO is already happily orbiting L1? Obviously, from L1 it has an unobstructed view of the sun all the time. Additionally, this gives us almost 180 degrees of coverage - not quite as good at the rim, but coverage none the less.
TFA says it was unusual that the protons from the CME got to earth as fast as they did, and says it's a mystery how they got accelerated.
My question is: were the protons actually accelerated? Were they more energetic when they arrived here than normal?
Maybe the solar explosion warped space in such a way that the protons didn't have to travel as far. Or maybe some other spacial distubance caused both the explosion and the proton effect.
January 20th? I guess we'll have to refer to it as "the nasty in the past-y".
Excuse the ignorance (wait, this is slashdot ...)
Would the moon (lack of atmosphere and all) have a longer standing record of solar events? We've only been monitoring the solar wind since (oblig FF ref), would Lunar 'soil samples' reveal evidence of 100 or 500 year storms?
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
As for the parents comment, think of all the debris that we are putting in our little part of space. This has been posted before, but the fact remains that every launch adds to the problem. Soon we will have a very serious mess, and no solution. A little paint chip will ruin your day. A loose nut will ruin much more.
KOA
Anchorage, Alaska Will Host National Policy Meeting on Technology
I blame the SUVs
Has no one here read the SF novel Sunstorm by Clarke & Baxter? You know, the sequel to Time's Eye.
If not, pick it up. The book's called Sunstorm, you figure it out.
The problem is, that although you can place satellites there, getting data from some of these places is a big problem, because you have to schedule antenna time through the deep space network.
Currently, there's the ESA-NASA project SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, which sits near L1. You can't actually place it directly in the sun-earth line, because then you can't communicate with the satellite, because of too much noise from the sun.
Currently in testing are the two observatories called STEREO, the Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory, which will launch two satellites flung ahead and behind the earth (but because of the physics involved, they have no way of stopping them, because they won't have enough fuel to stop.
(and there's also the Japanese Solar-B project, which is the successor to Yohkoh, set for launch next year)
But in my opinion, the most significant solar observing satellite in planning is SDO, the Solar Dynamics Observatory. (and I say this purely from an IT standpoint) SDO will be at an inclined geosyncronous orbit -- so it will be able to talk to a single antenna the whole time -- rather than storing up its data, and then sending it down to earth once a day, it will be sending a constant stream of full resolution data.
And we're not talking about the 1megapixel images from SOHO/EIT or SOHO/TRACE instruments -- or even the 4megapixel from STEREO/SECCHI. We're talking about 16 megapixel images, every 10 seconds from one of the instruments, with a planned terrabyte of uncompressed data per day.
Oh -- and I work for NASA contractor, and am assigned to work on STEREO and VSO (the Virtual Solar Observatory, a search engine for solar physics data).
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
i dont think he is on our team guys
How in the heck did that get moderated Insightful?
Even if the climate changes this year aren't completely attributed to human produced pollutants in our atmosphere, the solar storms are NOT a reason to scale back efforts to clean up industries that have been way too dirty for way too long.
There are benefits to enacting immediate changes and regulations that do more than just ensure we aren't cooking our country with green house gasses. We can also reap economic benefits of saving energy, having fewer health problems, and reducing dependance on Saudi Oil [which is a major factor in thousands of American troops dying overseas these past years].
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Half of /. isn't blaming Bush for this.
The Magnetic north pole attracts these nasty charged particles from space (and they come crashing into the ionisphere and create aurora borealis --the northern lights. But (JOY!) the magnetic north pole is moving away from Canada (towards the former Soviet Russia --Siberia-- and so they can enjoy the assault of supercharged space particles raining down on them. And since it's moving toward them at at least 40Km/year, it should be out of Canada and in their back yard within 5 years.
Also:
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Old one:
A Hydrogen ion walks into a police station, "Help! Someone stole my electron!"
Police: "Are you sure?
H ion: "Yes, I'm positive."
bombarded earth with fast moving protons that could have harmed astronauts caught without a radiation shield.
Phew! Good thing NASA was in another multi-year shut-down mode!
Really, America has become so pussified about manned space exploration that they might as well just give it up to the Chinese. No American will ever walk on Mars or even the Moon again.
I don't believe the protons were accelerated at all. Rather, I believe that they were decelerated.
What I believe we are seeing, is the deceleration of relativistic lone quarks and antiquarks, down to speeds that allow them to interact with us in the electromagnetic spectrum, as protons, neutrons, and other colorless particles.
The relativistic quarks and antiquarks would interact with nonrelativistic nuclei and electrons through the strong force, and would be known as "gravity".
However, the magnetic fields of the sun could be capable of slowing them down enough to form protons of significant lifetime; these, in turn, would become the instantaneous proton storm we see.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I've heard, recently, that there's so much forrest, agraculture and so-on in the USA that it's taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere faster than it's putting it in, but I don't have a cite for it.
Before enacting legislation requiring expensive steps to reduce global warming, we should really be spending a little money finding out exactly what's going on.
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"Before enacting legislation requiring expensive steps to reduce global warming, we should really be spending a little money finding out exactly what's going on."
Well, you *could* assume that we'd not want to warm the climate more, which means your reasoning is that we CAN change the climate if we want to. Obviously we can, since greenhouse gasses are made when we create most forms of energy we use, and greenhouse gasses are easily shown to trap energy from the sun in our atmosphere. Why you think it's better to err on the side of keeping foul pollution, over the side of cleaning things up, is beyond me.
"I've heard, recently, that there's so much forrest, agraculture and so-on in the USA that it's taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere faster than it's putting it in"
I think you heard a load of BS. Consider how much area is now deforrested because of humans, and I'm sure if you look into it, you'd find that forrests are a bigger carbon sink than grass, crops, and fallow fields. Not to mention what is "it" that you mention?
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WASHINGTON - A senior official at the White House Council on Environmental Quality has resigned, days after a newspaper reported he changed some government reports to downplay links between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.Philip Cooney, the council's chief of staff and a former energy industry lobbyist, resigned on Friday, two days after The New York Times reported he edited some descriptions of climate research in a way that cast doubt on links between greenhouse gas emissions and rising temperatures.
Cooney is a lawyer who previously worked for the American Petroleum Institute, which like the Bush administration opposes mandatory curbs on greenhouse gas emissions.
The Times reported that Cooney made handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, removing or adjusting language on climate research.
The paper said it obtained the reports from the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit group that is representing an official who resigned in March from the Climate Change Science Program, which issued the documents edited by Cooney.
In one document, Cooney reportedly crossed out a paragraph describing the projected reduction of mountain glaciers and snowpack from warming. Those projections, he noted in the margins, are "straying from research strategy into speculative findings/musings."
The Times also reported the words "significant and fundamental" were added before the word "uncertainties" when describing the state of climate science.
White House officials told the newspaper the changes were part of a normal interagency review of all documents related to global environmental change.
"All comments are reviewed, and some are accepted and some are rejected," Robert Hopkins, a spokesman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy told the newspaper.
In a memo sent last week to top officials dealing with climate change at a dozen agencies, Piltz charged that "politicization by the White House" was undermining the credibility and integrity of the science program.
A senior Environmental Protection Agency scientist, who spoke to the Times on condition of anonymity, said the editing "has somewhat of a chilling effect and has created a sense of frustration" among government scientists.
We need to move the Space Station closer to the Sun to block out this radiation. Pronto. And equip it with famale protons.
... am to become the next superman? I was flying from Bulgaria to northern Norway on January 20th...
Don't all protons travel at the same speed (ie, the speed of light)?
Right now, we have a lot of different computer programs that claim to show us the future. Not one of them can start with the known conditions of fifty years ago and end up with today. We don't understand why the climate is changing, and before we take drastic measures, we should learn what's really happening. As far as removing CO2 faster than we put it in, I'm talking about the US only. I heard it from somebody I trust to tell the truth, but I have no cites and if you don't want to believe it, I'll not argue the point.
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Lots of readers seem to be confusing Protons and Photons.
Photons are light.
They have zero rest mass, and always travel at the speed of light.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon)
Protons are the neucleus of a hydrogen atom.
It takes a lot of energy to get them moving anywhere near the speed of light.
A star, a particle accelerator, or a supernova would do.
No matter what you do, they will never reach the speed of light.
Thy have roughly the same mass as a hydrogen atom
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton)
NOAA maintains a list of 'Solar Proton Events'. My boss maintains a copy of the data, which has an extra footnote:So, the CME (believed to be) associated with it occured about 3 hrs before GOES got hit by it.
Images and movies of the event, as seen by LASCO, are at:
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I agree. It's quite obvious that the sun itself is to blame, and I think we should immediately start trade embargoes against the Sun, and pressure the UN to outlaw the Sun.
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
No nasty new NASA Solar Storm will work the willies out of me, my man!
Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
What do we know about the medium that our solar system is traveling through presently?
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
Apparently, the Earth magnetic field has decreased by 10% in the last 10 years. I'm an electrical engineerand during my studies in sub-atomic physics, I learned that a particles velocity can be effected by magnetic fields. I keep hearing about the increased activity of our Sun and I believe it's possible that more of the Sun's radiation is penetrating the Earth's magnetic field due to it being weaker. If more radiation hits the Earth and the Sun is spewing out more heat, shouldn't that also increase the overall temperature of the Earth and can global warming be contributed to this? I've been bouncing this idea in my head for a while now and I can't see why this MAY not be true.
I'm not asking for an exact match. The problem is that any program that claims to predict what the climate is going to do can't come anywhere close to predicting the present starting 50 years ago. The temperature curve never even has the same general shape.
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First of all the word you were looking for is "attributed". Contributed means to give to something.
In theory that could raise the earth's temperature if more IR and other heating radiation makes it to the surface to warm the earth, but there's also a pollution effect known as "global dimming" taking place. This is likely particulate matter from exhaust pipes of all types, and is blocking some solar rays from even hitting the earth.
Global warming is real, and pollution is real. It's a different argument to decide if global warming is good or not {it is not by the way}, but we have to reduce our pollution and carbon emmisions for other reasons besides global warming anyway. Smog, energy waste, extinctions, and global warming are 4 big reasons we have to do our part now to reduce pollution.
Take the bus for a few weeks out of the year if you drive. Bike to work at least twice a week. Turn off the AC at night and open the windows instead. Lobby your local government to build bike paths into all new urban development projects. There are many little things to do that aren't hard, and even though they don't seem like much, they will encourage other people to do their share too. The Greatest Generation took on the Nazis, now we have to take on Waste, or be forever labelled the Wasteful Generation.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.