NASA prepares to launch the first spacecraft to analyze the
carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere on July 1 from Vandenberg Air Force
Base in California. Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 is the second earth science
mission launched by NASA
Carbon dioxide being the vital part of our carbon cycle has
major impact on the climatic changes. Scientists have warned that carbon
dioxide released by human activity like burning of fossil fuel and deforestation
has disturbed the balance of natural carbon cycles. A portion of Carbon dioxide emitted stays in
the earth atmosphere and the remaining portion is observed by the ocean, but
the location and identity of the natural land sinks believed to be absorbing
the rest is not clearly understood.
The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) will clearly portrait
the sources of carbon dioxide, the process that pulls out carbon dioxide from
earth atmosphere.
Michael Freilich,
director of NASA’s Earth Science Division in Washington SAYS, “With the OCO-2
mission, NASA will be contributing an important new source of global
observations to the scientific challenge of better understanding our Earth and its
future."
Solar flare actually refers to the eruption of energy in the
sun’s surface. In simple terms, it is the sudden flash of brightness in the sun
layer. The radiations from flare are actually harmful to humans. The safest
part is that these radiations cannot pass through the earth surface. But still
if the radiations are more intense then it may disturb the atmospheric layer
where communication signals travel.
Recently on June 10, 2014 three X-class solar flares has
erupted in 2 days and the images were clearly captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics
Observatory. All the three flares have been emitted from the active region of
the sun.
The solar flares are represented as X1, X2. . X-class solar
flare, X denotes the most intense flame and number denotes the strength of the
flare. Higher number means more intense.
Forecasters are keeping a close eye on the Sun for more
updates.
11:40 PM
Gabriella Brianna
, Posted in
NASA Space News
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US space agency Nasa is seeking coders who could help thwart a global catastrophe by identify asteroids that may collapse into Earth. Its Asteroid Data Hunter contest will suggest $35,000 (£21,000) to programmers who can recognize asteroids capture by ground-based telescopes.The charming elucidation must increase the revealing rate and minimize the number of false positives.Scientists are progressively more work for be of assistance to make good judgment of measureless statistics sets.
The new enhanced asteroid hunt code must also be able to ignore imperfection in the figures and run on all computer systems."Protecting the planet from the intimidation of asteroid impact means first eloquent where they are," said Jenn Gustetic, decision-making of the programme.
"By opening up the search for asteroids, we are harnessing the potential of innovators and makers and citizen scientists everywhere to solve this global challenge."
Current asteroid detection is only tracking one percent of the estimated objects that orbit the sun, according to asteroid mining firm Planetary Resources, which is partnering with Nasa in the contest.Human curiosity Zooniverse is one of the leading online platforms for citizen scientists, working on a range of projects including classifying galaxies. In February it racked up one million volunteers.
"Nasa takes these detailed pictures but there is a lot of noise out there from stars and other things and we need to write code that can find patterns in the data," said Zooniverse team member Robert Simpson. "This is not necessarily Nasa's area of expertise. It is a technology problem rather than a space problem."He thinks that increasingly citizen scientists can contribute to important scientific discoveries and breakthroughs.
