Fall 2023 Public Events

WOW!

Original Post on X

Zoozve, my beloved

Today's word of the day is "earthshine" which is when the Earth reflects the Sun's light so that it makes the dark side of the moon glow! Super cool.

Image credit: Abhijit Juvekar

2023 October 18

Dust and the Western Veil Nebula Image Credit & Copyright: Jiang Wu

Explanation: It’s so big it is easy to miss. The entire Veil Nebula spans six times the diameter of the full moon, but is so dim you need binoculars to see it. The nebula was created about 15,000 years ago when a star in the constellation of the Swan (Cygnus) exploded. The spectacular explosion would have appeared brighter than even Venus for a week - but there is no known record of it. Pictured is the western edge of the still-expanding gas cloud. Notable gas filaments include the Witch’s Broom Nebula on the upper left near the bright foreground star 52 Cygni, and Fleming’s Triangular Wisp (formerly known as Pickering’s Triangle) running diagonally up the image middle. What is rarely imaged – but seen in the featured long exposure across many color bands – is the reflecting brown dust that runs vertically up the image left, dust likely created in the cool atmospheres of massive stars.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap231018.html

Our Halloween event is Wednesday, Oct. 25 from 7:00-8:30pm, weather allowing! Check in the early afternoon that day to see if the weather will allow it to go on.

If not, we have a rain date planned for Thursday (and a 2nd rain date for Monday if neither work out).

Sharpening Our View of Climate Change with the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem Satellite

As our planet warms, Earth’s ocean and atmosphere are changing.

Climate change has a lot of impact on the ocean, from sea level rise to marine heat waves to a loss of biodiversity. Meanwhile, greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide continue to warm our atmosphere.

NASA’s upcoming satellite, PACE, is soon to be on the case!

Set to launch on Feb. 6, 2024, the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission will help us better understand the complex systems driving the global changes that come with a warming climate.

Earth’s ocean is becoming greener due to climate change. PACE will see the ocean in more hues than ever before.

While a single phytoplankton typically can’t be seen with the naked eye, communities of trillions of phytoplankton, called blooms, can be seen from space. Blooms often take on a greenish tinge due to the pigments that phytoplankton (similar to plants on land) use to make energy through photosynthesis.

In a 2023 study, scientists found that portions of the ocean had turned greener because there were more chlorophyll-carrying phytoplankton. PACE has a hyperspectral sensor, the Ocean Color Instrument (OCI), that will be able to discern subtle shifts in hue. This will allow scientists to monitor changes in phytoplankton communities and ocean health overall due to climate change.

Phytoplankton play a key role in helping the ocean absorb carbon from the atmosphere. PACE will identify different phytoplankton species from space.

With PACE, scientists will be able to tell what phytoplankton communities are present – from space! Before, this could only be done by analyzing a sample of seawater.

Telling “who’s who” in a phytoplankton bloom is key because different phytoplankton play vastly different roles in aquatic ecosystems. They can fuel the food chain and draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to photosynthesize. Some phytoplankton populations capture carbon as they die and sink to the deep ocean; others release the gas back into the atmosphere as they decay near the surface.

Studying these teeny tiny critters from space will help scientists learn how and where phytoplankton are affected by climate change, and how changes in these communities may affect other creatures and ocean ecosystems.

Climate models are one of our most powerful tools to understand how Earth is changing. PACE data will improve the data these models rely on.

The PACE mission will offer important insights on airborne particles of sea salt, smoke, human-made pollutants, and dust – collectively called aerosols – by observing how they interact with light.

With two instruments called polarimeters, SPEXone and HARP2, PACE will allow scientists to measure the size, composition, and abundance of these microscopic particles in our atmosphere. This information is crucial to figuring out how climate and air quality are changing.

PACE data will help scientists answer key climate questions, like how aerosols affect cloud formation or how ice clouds and liquid clouds differ.

It will also enable scientists to examine one of the trickiest components of climate change to model: how clouds and aerosols interact. Once PACE is operational, scientists can replace the estimates currently used to fill data gaps in climate models with measurements from the new satellite.

With a view of the whole planet every two days, PACE will track both microscopic organisms in the ocean and microscopic particles in the atmosphere. PACE’s unique view will help us learn more about the ways climate change is impacting our planet’s ocean and atmosphere.

Stay up to date on the NASA PACE blog, and make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of sPACE!

We'll be open tonight, Wed. 4/30, 8:30 - 9:45 pm!

Video of the Day!

NASA’s next mission to the Moon will carry LEXI (the Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager), an instrument which will provide the first-ever global view of the magnetic field that shields Earth from solar radiation!

So far, the forecast this Wednesday doesn't look good, but we'll wait til that day to make the announcement. Stay tuned for August public night announcements, too!

So far, we think the sky will cooperate enough for us to see tomorrow's eclipse! We'll be handing out eclipse glasses around DMF tomorrow, and some other locations on campus from 10:30 am - 2:45 pm. Check back one more time in the morning about the weather.