After a journey of 10 years, astronomers are accelerating preparations for the arrival of Europe’s Rosetta space probe at Comet 67P/Churymov-Gerasimenko.
The spacecraft will be awakened in January 2014, with rendezvous later that year.
NASA has announced a press conference for later today about the Voyager spacecraft.
The rumors are that all the scientists involved with this data from this spacecraft now finally agree that Voyager has left the solar system. More to come.
The rumors were true: NASA has confirmed that Voyager 1 is out of the solar system and in interstellar space, and has been since last summer.
Astronomers have compiled the first detailed 3D map of the inner regions of the Milky Way. More here.
They find a box/peanut shaped bulge with an elongated bar and a prominent X-structure, which had been hinted at in previous studies. This indicates that the Milky Way was originally a pure disk of stars, which then formed a thin bar, before buckling into the box/peanut shape seen today.
Using photos from Dawn astronomers have now assembled an online atlas of the asteroid Vesta that the public can explore.
It appears that Deep Impact is lost.
The uncertainty of science: Despite the significant increase in the size of the Arctic Ocean’s icecap this winter, satellite data of the icecap’s actual volume and thickness suggest that the new ice was quite thin.
Prof Andy Shepherd, from Leeds University, said: “Now that we have three years of data, we can see that some parts of the ice pack have thinned more rapidly than others. At the end of winter, the ice was thinner than usual. Although this summer’s extent will not get near its all-time satellite-era minimum set last year, the very thin winter floes going into the melt season could mean that the summer volume still gets very close to its record low,” he told BBC News.
It is not surprising that the ice was thin, considering that the icecap was recovering from a record low the year before. The scientific question, however, is whether the cap will thicken in the coming years or continue to thin out. That it has recovered somewhat in size might be a onetime jump as the decline continues, or it might be indicative of a new growing trend.
After more than two weeks the labor strike at the ALMA telescope array in Chile has ended.
Today NOAA posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, and as I do every month, I am posting it here, with annotations.
Before we take a look at that, however, there is other climate news that is apropos. The Daily Mail in the UK put out an entertaining article on Saturday with the headline “And now it’s global COOLING! Record return of Arctic ice cap as it grows by 60% in a year.”
The article is entertaining because, after illustrating the ice-cap’s recovery this year, it then notes the 2007 prediction by global warming climate scientists that the Arctic Ocean would be “ice-free” by 2013. If this isn’t a good example of the dangers of crying wolf, I don’t know what is.
I should emphasize that the ice-cap recovery this year does not prove that global warming has ceased. A look at this graph from satellite data shows that even though the Arctic icecap has recovered, it is still remains small when compared to the past few decades. The increase this year might only be a blip, or it could be indicating a new trend. We won’t really know for another five years, if then.
The article is also entertaining because it outlines the confusion that is right now going on behind the scenes at the IPCC. The next IPCC report is scheduled to come out next month, but no one agrees with its conclusions because it apparently ignores or minimizes the approximately fifteen year pause in warming that has now been documented since the late-1990s.
In its draft report, the IPCC says it is ‘95 per cent confident’ that global warming has been caused by humans – up from 90 per cent in 2007. This claim is already hotly disputed. US climate expert Professor Judith Curry said last night: ‘In fact, the uncertainty is getting bigger. It’s now clear the models are way too sensitive to carbon dioxide. I cannot see any basis for the IPCC increasing its confidence level.’ [emphasis mine]
It appears that scientists and governments are demanding approximately 1500 changes to the IPCC draft, which suggests its release will be delayed significantly.
Meanwhile, the Sun continues its lackluster and weak solar maximum.
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NASA engineers have successfully fixed the glitch on the LADEE spacecraft.
NASA’s lunar probe LADEE was successfully launched tonight from Wallops Island.
Update: A computer glitch occurred shortly after reaching orbit, causing the computer to shut down the spacecraft’s reaction wheels.
Engineers seem unworried, and expect to have the problem solved within a couple of days.
Some good news from the James Webb Space Telescope: The project manager said today that all the problems outlined in a December GAO report have been resolved.
Some of these issues are also described here.
NASA has lost contact with its Deep Impact probe and is racing against time to save it.
