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AMATEUR ASTRONOMERS PHOTOGRAPH ROADSTER IN SPACE: It's official. Elon Musk's cherry red Tesla Roadster is a spacecraft. NASA is now listing the electric car in its database of celestial objects with an ephemeris for tracking it available on JPL's Horizons web site.
Using that ephemeris, along with a remote-controlled telescope in Siding Spring, Australia, amateur astronomer Adriano Valvasori photographed the Roadster on Feb. 8th. It is the faint speck circled in red:
At the time, the car was 493,000 km (306,000) away, not far beyond the orbit of the Moon, receding from Earth about 3.7 km/s (8,300 mph). Reflecting sunlight, it shone about as brightly as a 16th magnitude star.
Another amateur astronomer, Raymond Kneip, photographed the Roadster about 3 hours before Valvasori did:
"It's the craziest thing I've ever captured with a telescope," he says. Like Valvasori, Kneip used an iTelescope at the Siding Spring Observatory to photograph the hurtling Tesla.
NASA designates the spacecraft "Tesla Roadster" with two aliases: "Starman" and "2018-017A," described in the ephemeris as follows:
Dummy payload from the first launch of SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch vehicle [on Feb. 6, 2018]. Consists of a standard Tesla Roadster automobile and a spacesuit-wearing mannequin nicknamed "Starman". Also includes a Hot Wheels toy model Roadster on the car's dash with a mini-Starman inside. A data storage device placed inside the car contains a copy of Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" novels. A plaque on the attachment fitting between the Falcon Heavy upper stage and the Tesla is etched with the names of more than 6,000 SpaceX employees.
To see the ephemeris for yourself, launch the Horizons web interface and follow these instructions: Click "change" next to Target Body. Type in "SpaceX" and hit enter. Click "Generate Ephemeris." The celestial coordinates of the Roadster will appear on your screen.
Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery
A CRACK IN EARTH'S MAGNETIC FIELD: Lights over Lapland tour guide Oliver Wright wasn't expecting a great display of auroras on Feb. 8th when he took his guests into the snowy recesses of Sweden's Abisko National Park. There was no geomagnetic storm in the forecast. Nevertheless, this happened:
"The planetary K-index (Kp, an indicator of global geomagnetic activity) was less than 1--that is, very low. There should have been no auroras," says Wright. "Yet we saw a beautiful display of pink, blue and green."
What happened? Wright has the answer: "On Spaceweather.com, I saw 'B sub z' tipping south." This opened a crack in Earth's magnetic field. "Solar wind came flooding in and caused a nice display of auroras over Abisko."
"I've been telling our guests not to pay too much attention to Kp," says Wright. "Tonight was a brilliant example." Indeed it was. Around the Arctic Circle, auroras routinely defy Kp; browse the gallery for more examples. Free: Aurora Alerts
Realtime Aurora Photo Gallery
VALENTINE'S DAY IS NEXT WEEK! Does your sweetheart love auroras? As a Valentine's Day fundraiser, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus flew a payload-full of Northern Lights pendants to the stratosphere onboard a high-altitude helium balloon. Here's one 109,908 feet above the Sierras of central California:
You have have one for $99.95. Each necklace comes with a greeting card showing the jewelry in flight and telling the story of its journey to the stratosphere and back again. Sales support the Earth to Sky Calculus cosmic ray ballooning program and hands-on STEM research.
Far Out Gifts: Earth to Sky Store
All proceeds support hands-on STEM education
Every night, a network of
NASA all-sky cameras scans the skies above the United States for meteoritic fireballs. Automated software maintained by NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office calculates their orbits, velocity, penetration depth in Earth's atmosphere and many other characteristics. Daily results are presented here on Spaceweather.com.
On Feb. 9, 2018, the network reported 21 fireballs.
(21 sporadics)
In this diagram of the inner solar system, all of the fireball orbits intersect at a single point--Earth. The orbits are color-coded by velocity, from slow (red) to fast (blue). [Larger image] [movies]
Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (
PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding
new ones all the time.
On February 9, 2018 there were 1882 potentially hazardous asteroids.
|
Recent & Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters: Asteroid | Date(UT) | Miss Distance | Velocity (km/s) | Diameter (m) |
2002 CB19 | 2018-Feb-03 | 10.1 LD | 15.7 | 36 |
2018 CT | 2018-Feb-03 | 1.7 LD | 19.1 | 25 |
2018 BN5 | 2018-Feb-03 | 15.9 LD | 9.4 | 23 |
2018 BG3 | 2018-Feb-03 | 11.9 LD | 14.2 | 60 |
2018 CA1 | 2018-Feb-04 | 7.9 LD | 15 | 33 |
2018 AH12 | 2018-Feb-04 | 5.3 LD | 5 | 15 |
276033 | 2018-Feb-04 | 11 LD | 34 | 646 |
2018 BP6 | 2018-Feb-05 | 3.7 LD | 13.7 | 44 |
2018 CL | 2018-Feb-06 | 2.4 LD | 8.6 | 28 |
2018 CM | 2018-Feb-06 | 2.1 LD | 9.6 | 10 |
2018 CC | 2018-Feb-06 | 0.5 LD | 10.6 | 17 |
2018 CN | 2018-Feb-07 | 1.3 LD | 19.9 | 18 |
2018 BL1 | 2018-Feb-09 | 16.5 LD | 20.3 | 76 |
2018 CA | 2018-Feb-09 | 19.9 LD | 7.6 | 68 |
511684 | 2018-Feb-09 | 12.9 LD | 17.7 | 257 |
2018 CB | 2018-Feb-09 | 0.2 LD | 7.3 | 23 |
1991 VG | 2018-Feb-11 | 18.4 LD | 2.1 | 7 |
2018 CX | 2018-Feb-11 | 5.7 LD | 11 | 32 |
2014 WQ202 | 2018-Feb-11 | 15.1 LD | 19.8 | 62 |
2018 CB1 | 2018-Feb-15 | 9.5 LD | 11.3 | 28 |
2018 CC1 | 2018-Feb-15 | 14.1 LD | 15.4 | 65 |
2018 CJ | 2018-Feb-20 | 9.3 LD | 15.3 | 66 |
2016 CO246 | 2018-Feb-22 | 15.3 LD | 5.4 | 21 |
2017 DR109 | 2018-Feb-24 | 3.7 LD | 7.4 | 11 |
2016 FU12 | 2018-Feb-26 | 13.2 LD | 4.5 | 15 |
2014 EY24 | 2018-Feb-27 | 14.8 LD | 8 | 54 |
2015 BF511 | 2018-Feb-28 | 11.7 LD | 5.7 | 39 |
2003 EM1 | 2018-Mar-07 | 16.6 LD | 8 | 45 |
2017 VR12 | 2018-Mar-07 | 3.8 LD | 6.3 | 280 |
2015 DK200 | 2018-Mar-10 | 6.9 LD | 8 | 27 |
2016 SR2 | 2018-Mar-28 | 18.7 LD | 7.3 | 20 |
2010 GD35 | 2018-Mar-31 | 15.5 LD | 11.6 | 45 |
2004 FG29 | 2018-Apr-02 | 4 LD | 14.9 | 22 |
Notes: LD means "Lunar Distance." 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distance between Earth and the Moon. 1 LD also equals 0.00256 AU. MAG is the visual magnitude of the asteroid on the date of closest approach. | Cosmic Rays in the Atmosphere |
Readers, thank you for your patience while we continue to develop this new section of Spaceweather.com. We've been working to streamline our data reduction, allowing us to post results from balloon flights much more rapidly, and we have developed a new data product, shown here:
This plot displays radiation measurements not only in the stratosphere, but also at aviation altitudes. Dose rates are expessed as multiples of sea level. For instance, we see that boarding a plane that flies at 25,000 feet exposes passengers to dose rates ~10x higher than sea level. At 40,000 feet, the multiplier is closer to 50x. These measurements are made by our usual cosmic ray payload as it passes through aviation altitudes en route to the stratosphere over California.
What is this all about? Approximately once a week, Spaceweather.com and the students of Earth to Sky Calculus fly space weather balloons to the stratosphere over California. These balloons are equipped with radiation sensors that detect cosmic rays, a surprisingly "down to Earth" form of space weather. Cosmic rays can seed clouds, trigger lightning, and penetrate commercial airplanes. Furthermore, there are studies ( #1, #2, #3, #4) linking cosmic rays with cardiac arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death in the general population. Our latest measurements show that cosmic rays are intensifying, with an increase of more than 13% since 2015:
Why are cosmic rays intensifying? The main reason is the sun. Solar storm clouds such as coronal mass ejections (CMEs) sweep aside cosmic rays when they pass by Earth. During Solar Maximum, CMEs are abundant and cosmic rays are held at bay. Now, however, the solar cycle is swinging toward Solar Minimum, allowing cosmic rays to return. Another reason could be the weakening of Earth's magnetic field, which helps protect us from deep-space radiation.
The radiation sensors onboard our helium balloons detect X-rays and gamma-rays in the energy range 10 keV to 20 MeV. These energies span the range of medical X-ray machines and airport security scanners.
The data points in the graph above correspond to the peak of the Reneger-Pfotzer maximum, which lies about 67,000 feet above central California. When cosmic rays crash into Earth's atmosphere, they produce a spray of secondary particles that is most intense at the entrance to the stratosphere. Physicists Eric Reneger and Georg Pfotzer discovered the maximum using balloons in the 1930s and it is what we are measuring today.
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