I did warn you… Just about everyone’s now covering the falling UARS satellite – that’s the 5 tonne, 20-year-old UARS satellite. Nasa has further refined their estimate of when it will come down. As of 10:30 a.m. EDT on Sept. 23, 2011, the orbit of UARS was 100 miles by 105 miles (160 km by 170 km). Re-entry is expected late Friday, Sept. 23, or early Saturday, Sept. 24, Eastern Daylight Time. Solar activity is no longer the major factor …
Nasa’s Dawn spacecraft remains in orbit around the 530km-wide proto-planet Vesta – the second most massive object in the main asteroid belt. And they’ve released this cool video constructed from the images they’ve obtained so far. Via JPLnews Here’s an image of the south pole of Vesta from a distance of about 1,700 miles (2,700 kilometers). [Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA] And speaking of exo-planets, scientists using the orbiting Kepler observatory have identifed the first circumbinary planet, the first planet known to definitively orbit two …
Nasa has released some stunning satellite images, from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER), of the ‘footprint’ left by the monster tornado which hit Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on April 27th. The false-colour images use visible and infra-red data. [Image credit: Science@NASA] From the Science at Nasa report “This is the first time we’ve used the ASTER instrument to track the wake of a super-outbreak of tornadoes,” says NASA meteorologist Gary Jedlovec of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL. In the …
As the Belfast Telegraph notes, smoke from the fires across the UK and Ireland are clearly visible in the stunning satellite images from NASA/GSFC’s MODIS Rapid Response System. This is a cropped, smaller, version of an image taken at 12.50pm [BST] on 2 May at a resolution of 500 metres. Red is used to indicate the site of a fire. (Image credit: NASA/GSFC, MODIS Rapid Response System) And a close-up of the visible smoke plumes. Note to Belfast Telegraph – See “About Rapid Response Imagery”. …
As spotted by WorldbyStorm. For copyright reasons I’ll not reproduce it here, but Met Éireann have a stunning image of the snowfall across the UK & Ireland taken at 13.09 on 22 December from the NERC Satellite Receiving Station, Dundee University, Scotland. And if you take a look at their gallery, you’ll see things haven’t changed much since then… Pete Baker
