Geomagnetic activity caused by our star recently created a stir in the skies over Iceland, resulting in the seeming electrification of the night, as captured here by photographer Ollie Taylor.
Unpredictable and temperamental, our Sun blasts intense radiation and colossal amounts of energetic material in every direction, creating the ever-changing conditions in space known as ‘space weather’.
The solar wind is a constant stream of electrons, protons and stripped-down atoms emitted by the Sun, while coronal mass ejections are the Sun’s periodic outbursts of colossal clouds of solar plasma. These events disturb Earth’s protective magnetic field, creating geomagnetic storms at our planet.
Solar events can seriously interfere with infrastructure on Earth and in space, and pose a radiation threat to future explorers of the Moon and Mars. It is thought that a solar storm today on the scale of the Carrington event of 1859 would cause billions of euros of damage, by disturbing satellite systems, power grids, radio communications and all social and commercial services depending on these critical elements of our infrastructure.
While solar events can’t be prevented, advance warning can give operators time to act to protect critical infrastructure. ESA’s planned Lagrange mission to monitor the Sun will do just that, by feeding data into the European Space Weather Service Network and enabling accurate and reliable space weather forecasts.
From 3-5 March 2019, ESA will be holding a SocialSpace event in Tromsø, Norway, offering participants the chance to learn all about the stunning Aurora and its slightly sinister origins.
For more of Ollie’s wonderful photography, visit his website here.
Captured on 3 September 2018 by the Copernicus Sentinel-2A satellite, this image shows part of western Sicily in Italy and two of the main Aegadian Islands: Favignana and Levanzo.
This false-colour image included the near-infrared channel and was processed in a way, that makes vegetation appear in bright red.
The bright turquoise colours, near the port city of Trapani, at the top of the image, and the Isola Grande in the middle of the image, depict salt marshes. Both the Saline di Trapani e Paceco Nature Reserve and the Stagnone Nature Reserve with their shallow sea waters, windy coast and abundant sunshine, make the area between Marsala, at the bottom of the image, and Trapani an ideal place for salt production.
The reserve consists of more than 1000 hectares of landscape dotted with windmills, migratory birds such as flamingos and light-red lagoons visible in summer. This greenish-blue colour is heavily contrasted with the black of the open Mediterranean Sea.
The islands, off the coast, are rich in history, both boasting Paleolithic and Neolithic cave paintings. The most famous being the Grotta del Genovese on the picturesque island of Levanzo, at the top left of the image. The cave was discovered only in 1949 and is estimated to be between 6000 and 10 000 years old.
Below, the butterfly-shaped island of Favignana, known for its tuna fisheries and a type of limestone known as tufa rock, is the largest of the Aegadian islands. In 241 BC, one of the Punic Wars’ naval battles was fought at the Cala Rossa (Red Cove), named after the bloodshed.
Copernicus Sentinel-2 is a two-satellite mission. Each satellite carries a high-resolution camera that images Earth’s surface in 13 spectral bands. The mission is mostly used to track changes in the way land is being used and to monitor the health of our vegetation.
This image is also featured on the Earth from Space video programme.
This image from ESA’s Mars Express shows a network of dried-up valleys on Mars, and comprises data gathered on 19 November 2018 during Mars Express orbit 18831. The ground resolution is approximately 14 m/pixel and the images are centered at 66°E/17°S. This image was created using data from the nadir and colour channels of the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). The nadir channel is aligned perpendicular to the surface of Mars, as if looking straight down at the surface. North is to the right.
This composite image shows the location of Neptune's moon Hippocamp, formerly known just as S/2004 N 1, orbiting the giant planet Neptune, about 4.8 billion kilometres from Earth.
The moon is only about 34 kilometres in diameter and dim, and was therefore missed by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft cameras when the probe flew by Neptune in 1989. Several other moons that were discovered by Voyager appear in this 2009 image, along with a circumplanetary structure known as ring arcs.
Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute discovered Hippocamp in July 2013 when analysing over 150 archival images of Neptune taken by Hubble from 2004 to 2009.
This image of Mount Agung on the Indonesian island of Bali was captured on 2 July 2018 by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission. After being dormant for 50 years, Mount Agung erupted in November 2017. It has continued to erupt on and off since then – a bright orange spot can be seen in the volcano’s crater. Recent research provides evidence that Agung and the neighbouring Batur volcano, visible northwest of Agung, may have a connected magma plumbing system.
Concordia station, located on a plateau 3200 m above sea level on the Antarctic peninsula, is first and foremost a research hub.
Nestled at the very southern tip of Earth, where temperatures can drop to –80 °C in the winter, and a yearly average temperature of –50 °C, the station offers researchers the opportunity to collect data and experiment like no other place on Earth.
Among these researchers is a team of micrometeorite hunters scouting the snow and ice for traces of extra-terrestrial material less than a millimetre in diameter. Every year the amount of micrometeorites accounts for up to 1000 tonnes of particles on Earth.
Some of these fall in Antarctica where the frigid temperatures preserve these cosmic particles.
The French team of micrometeorite hunters at Concordia managed to remove just over 1000 cubic meters of ice and snow, setting a record.
The snow is slowly melted and filtered for micrometeorites that are then analysed. The results help further our understanding of the origins of the Solar System.
Researchers spent hours digging in the –50 °C temperatures for several days, equipped with protective suits, rubber gloves, picks and shovels in the name of cosmochemistry.
The end of their dig meant some fun for the residents. While researchers must ensure the ice and snow samples are as pristine as possible, once they had finished their sampling the trench could be “contaminated” by the boots of others.
Recreation is just as important for the isolated crew as the science and research that takes place there. So on a Sunday the residents took to the trench with sleds and snowmobiles.
The 7-m deep trench is a snowy time capsule, of sorts. Antarctica is the world's driest continent and Concordia is situated in the world’s largest desert. The layers of packed snow in the trench are the accumulation of approximately 80 years of snowfall.
To put it in the words of ESA-sponsored medical doctor Nadja Albertsen, “when the snow that we experienced on Sunday fell, World War II was just beginning and the atomic bomb was still just an idea.”
Dr. Albertsen is currently in residence at Concordia to run the biological experiments at the base. You can follow her adventures on the Chronicles from Concordia blog.
While scientists continue to follow the case of micrometeorites on Earth, we leave you to ponder the writing on the trench wall.
The construction of the launch complex for the next generation of the Ariane launcher series is well under way at Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana.
An ESA-led team test the suitability of Intel’s new Myriad 2 artificial intelligence chip to fly in space using a radiation beam at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. AI offers enhanced autonomy and performance for all kinds of future scientific instruments, not only for space.
Instruments are fundamental to science: tools and precision measuring devices that can do and see things that the unaided human body cannot. That is why Europe’s top eight intergovernmental research organisations have joined forces through the EIROforum to set up an annual school on instrumentation.
Along with ESA and CERN, EIROforum is made up of the EUROfusion consortium studying nuclear fusion, the European Southern Observatory for astronomy, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility for radiation research, the Institut Laue-Langevin for neutron research and the European X-Ray Free-Electron Laser Facility studying X-ray laser pulses.
EIROforum’s sixth School on Instrumentation will take place from 13–17 May at ESA’s technical heart: ESTEC in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. The highlight topic of this year’s school is AI for instrumentation.
Young researchers, scientists and engineers are welcome to join this event, to get the chance to meet and learn from Europe’s top instrumentation experts with lectures and hands-on sessions covering a wide range of topics such as high-energy physics, nuclear fusion, astronomy, molecular biology, synchrotron radiation and neutron physics.
Participants to the school will be selected from those registered; the deadline for application is 15 March and the application form can be found on the school website here.
The AI chip testing at CERN shown here took place late last year. All candidate hardware to be flown in space first needs to be tested against radiation: space is riddled with charged particles from the Sun and further out in the cosmos. An agreement with CERN gives access to the most intense beam of ultra-high energy heavy ions available – short of travelling into orbit.
Sitting beyond Jupiter and Saturn in our Solar System, these two planets have only been visited once by a spacecraft, albeit briefly. NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft swung by Uranus in 1986, and Neptune in 1989, snapping the only close-up detailed images of these distant worlds.
The first images of Neptune revealed a planet with a dynamic atmosphere, including two mysterious dark vortices. Uranus, however, appeared featureless. But these views were just one-time snapshots: they couldn’t capture how the planets’ atmospheres change over time.
Enter the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been making a roughly annual check-up of these distant worlds as they go through protracted seasonal changes in their multi-decades-long orbits – a year on Uranus is 84 Earth years, while Neptune takes 165 of our years to orbit the Sun.
The latest pair of Hubble images are presented here, displaying Uranus (left) alive with activity and Neptune (right) showing off a new dark storm.
The vast bright polar cap across the north pole dominates the image of Uranus. The cap, which may form due to seasonal changes in atmospheric flow, has become much more prominent than in previous observations dating back to the Voyager 2 flyby, when the planet, in the throes of winter, looked bland.
Scientists believe this feature is a result of Uranus’ unique rotation. Unlike every other planet in the Solar System, Uranus is tipped over almost onto its side. Because of this extreme tilt, during the planet’s summer the Sun shines almost directly onto the north pole and never sets. Uranus is now approaching the middle of its 21 year-long summer season and the polar-cap region is becoming more prominent.
Near the edge of the cloud cap is a large cloud of methane ice, while a narrow cloud band encircles the planet north of the equator. It is a mystery how bands like these are confined to such narrow widths, because Uranus and Neptune have very broad westward-blowing wind jets.
The latest images show that Neptune has a new swirling dark storm spanning nearly 11 000 km across – roughly equivalent to the distance between Lisbon, Portugal and Tokyo, Japan. It is accompanied by bright white ‘companion clouds’ formed when the flow of ambient air is perturbed and diverted upward over the dark vortex, causing gases to freeze into methane ice crystals. Like Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, the dark vortices swirl in an anti-cyclonic direction and seem to dredge up material from deeper levels in the ice giant’s atmosphere.
Both Uranus and Neptune are classified as ‘ice giant’ planets, which are fundamentally different to the gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn. They have no solid surface but rather layers of hydrogen and helium surrounding a water-rich interior, itself perhaps wrapped around a rocky core. Atmospheric methane absorbs red light but allows blue-green light to be scattered back into space, giving each planet a characteristic cyan hue.
Analysing these worlds will help scientists better understand the diversity and similarities of the planets in our own Solar System as well as the thousands of exoplanets discovered in other solar systems – the vast majority of which fall into the size range of Neptune and Uranus.
Indeed, ESA’s upcoming exoplanet mission Cheops will focus on analysing stars that are known to host Earth to Uranus- and Neptune-sized planets, providing a first step-characterisation into the nature of these alien worlds.
Given a favourable alignment of Jupiter to provide gravity assists in the late 2020s-early 2030s, NASA and ESA have also been studying concepts to send a mission to the ice giants to better understand this little-understood class of planets.
These images were captured in late 2018 as part of the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program, and first published on 7 February 2019. This caption is based on the original release.
Week in images
18 - 22 February 2019