Apr 2 2008
From The Space Library
At the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting, a team of researchers led by Peter T. Gallagher of Trinity College, Dublin, announced that they had produced new, corrected estimates of the speed at which solar tsunamis move. Solar tsunamis, first photographed by NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft in the 1990’s, are huge pressure waves that roll through the Sun’s gaseous atmosphere. Although the scientific community had previously estimated the speed of solar tsunamis based upon the SOHO photographs, these estimates had not correlated with the waves’ estimated intensity—an intensity equivalent to the release, in a fraction of a second, of 2 billion times the world’s annual energy consumption. To correct the estimates, Gallagher’s team had analyzed photographs that NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft had captured on 19 May 2007. Because STEREO had captured more images per day than SOHO had, the researchers had been able to calculate the speed of solar tsunamis at over 1 million kilometers per hour (over 621,371.19 miles per hour), much faster than scientists had previously thought. Additionally, the researchers had used STEREO’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager instruments to show that the solar tsunamis had moved through dense layers of the atmosphere just as quickly as through less dense layers. Solar tsunamis are associated with the appearance of coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which are massive explosions of gas and magnetic fields near the Sun’s atmosphere. Astronomers believed that monitoring solar tsunamis could help to predict CMEs.
Andrea Thompson, “Solar Tsunamis Move at Astronomical Speeds,” Space.com, 1 April 2008, http://www.space.com/5198-solar-tsunamis-move-astronomical-speeds.html (accessed 3 March 2011).
The House Science, Space, and Technology Subcommittee on Research and Science Education held a hearing to address international science and technology cooperation. NASA Assistant Administrator for External Relations Michael F. O’Brien testified on the scope of international collaboration in NASA’s programming, as well as the benefits to the United States of ongoing international scientific cooperation. O’Brien stated that, since its inception in 1958, NASA had entered more than 3,000 cooperative agreements with over 100 nations or international organizations. He said that NASA was currently a party to approximately 300 active international agreements, and that over half of NASA’s missions currently in orbit involved international participation. O’Brien also discussed the benefits of scientific cooperation with other nations, including the availability to the global scientific community of research data, the advancement of specific NASA mission objectives, and the promotion of U.S. foreign policy interests.
U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Subcommittee on Research and Science Education, “Witnesses: International Science Collaboration Mutually Beneficial,” press release, 2 April 2008, http://gop.science.house.gov/Pressroom/Item.aspx?ID=91 (accessed 17 February 2011); U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Subcommittee on Research and Science Education, “International Science and Technology Cooperation,” 110th Cong., 2nd sess., 2 April 2008, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-110hhrg41470/pdf/CHRG-110hhrg41470.pdf (accessed 4 March 2011).
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