Tag archives for weather
Posted by —Image courtesy NOAA Next week NASA will launch the latest in a series of satellites run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration designed to track extreme weather events from space. Known as the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites, or GOES, each craft carries a letter designation until it arrives in orbit, when it is renamed…
Any allergy sufferer will tell you that dust can be a killer. But those dust bunnies under the couch have nothing on the planet-wide storms that periodically engulf Mars in late spring and early summer. —Image courtesy NASA, J. Ball (Cornell), M. Wolff (SSI), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Such storms are kind of…
Sometimes it seems like being large, distant, and gassy is a major turn-off for space engineers—unless you’ve got great eyes or lots of jewelry. Of the eight recognized planets in our solar system, the terrestrial worlds are by far the in-crowd as far as scientific orbiters are concerned, with Mars and Earth as the obvious…
The tug-of-war between space-based and ground-based telescopes continues, with today’s release of what’s being called the sharpest full-planet image of Jupiter taken by an on-the-ground observatory. —Image courtesy ESO [versus] Jupiter, as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2007 —Image courtesy NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI) An international team used the…
Move over, Mars, you’re not the only act in town that can show folks some extreme weather. The orbiting Cassini spacecraft took this image, released today by NASA, of Saturn’s northern latitudes, including an edge of the planet’s famed atmospheric hexagon that swirls around its north pole. —Image courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute The tight, high-resolution…
Posted by One of the most vivid memories I have of Hurricane Katrina harks back to the morning of August 28, 2005–exactly three years ago today. Turning on the television in my bedroom, I saw the news that a Category Five hurricane was barreling directly toward New Orleans. In almost the same instant I reached for the phone…
