Supersonic skydiver Felix Baumgartner's records confirmed

Remember the jump Felix Baumgartner did from an impressive 38,969.4 metres altitude back on October 14th last year? The World Air Sports Federation, or FAI, confirmed him breaking three records with that jump.

The records that have been smashed by Felix are the maximum vertical speed record ( 1,357.6 kilometres (843.6 miles) an hour, or Mach 1.25, in freefall), highest exit altitude (38,969.4 metres) and vertical distance of freefall (36,402.6 metres ) before he opened his parachute.

With his jump, Baumgartner was also the first human to break the speed of sound outside of a vehicle. The free fall part of his jump lasted 4 minutes and 19 seconds.

Cloudy with a chance of protons

A colossal sunspot captured on camera by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (one of several spacecraft that constantly monitor the sun), could trigger solar flares this week. The sunspot swelled to enormous proportions over 19 and 20 Feb, growing to over 6 Earth diameters across.

As magnetic fields on the sun rearrange and realign, dark spots called sunspots can be created. Sunspots are regions on the solar surface that are cooler than their surroundings (well, 4500K but still cool compared the rest of the photosphere).

The sunspot in question grew to a "delta region", in which the magnetic fields in the center of the sunspot, point in the opposite direction of the ones in the outer region. Such a fairly unstable configuration can lead to solar flares: eruptions of radiation on the sun.

The sun’s activity is expected to peak sometime this year, while being in the midst of its 11-year weather cycle (current one called Solar Cycle 24).

Image: The bottom two black spots are part of the same system and over six Earths across

CURIOSITY CAPTURES STUNNING NEW INTERACTIVE MARS PANORAMA

An incredible interactive self-portrait has been taken by the Curiosity rover on Mars revealing a wonderful insight into this distant world. The panorama was taken in the Yellowknife Bay region within the gale creator, an area believed to have been flooded with water in the distant past of the planet.

This area is in fact the first area in human history where a rover has drilled into the surface of another planet.
If you look closely at the ground in front of the rover you can see two small grey holes on the Martian surface, this is a shallow drill test hole and a sample collection hole, and both are 1.6 centimetres in diameter.

The panoramic image taken is comprised of many images taken from two separate cameras on the rover that have been stitched together. The Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) mounted on top of a robotic arm was used to capture the self-portrait of the rover but excluded any images that show the arm itself, resulting in a strange illusion that the picture was taken by something else, this is not the case. This camera took 66 images. The Mastcam was then used to take the panoramic landscape frames and comprises of 130 images.

The portrait and landscape photographs are then cleverly woven together to create an awe inspiring window into the surface of another planet.

Thanks to this incredible achievement, most of the human species can witness the exploration of another world; a new age of discovery has begun.

“Science is a collaborative enterprise spanning the generations, when it permits us to see the far side of some new horizon, we remember those who prepared the way, seeing for them also” -Carl Sagan

Star-Forming Heart

Generations of stars can be seen in this infrared portrait from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. In this wispy star-forming region, called W5, the oldest stars can be seen as blue dots in the centers of the two hollow cavities (other blue dots are background and foreground stars not associated with the region).

Younger stars line the rims of the cavities, and some can be seen as pink dots at the tips of the elephant-trunk-like pillars. The white knotty areas are where the youngest stars are forming. Red shows heated dust that pervades the region's cavities, while green highlights dense clouds.

MOON(S) OF VENUS

Venus (like Mercury) currently has no known natural satellite (moon).

But this doesn't mean we stop looking. As recently as 2009, astronomers completed a new survey searching for possible Venusian moons (with a lower size limit of about a kilometre).

However, Venus has had moon(s) in the past:
In 1672, Giovanni Cassini discovered a small object close to Venus. Re-observing the object in 1686, he declared it a possible moon of Venus. Many observations followed; including when a spot was seen to follow Venus during a transit across the Sun in 1761. However, some astronomers failed to find the satellite, despite determined observations.

In 1766, the director of the Vienna Observatory speculated that the “moon” was actually the result of an optical illusion but research carried on, and in 1977 its orbital period was calculated to be 11 days and 3 hours.

In 1884, the moon was declared to be a planet, which orbited the Sun every 283 days. The moon/planet was named Neith (after the Egyptian goddess of hunting and war).

The Belgian Academy of Sciences published a paper in 1887, reviewing every reported sighting of Neith. They determined that most of the sightings could be explained by stars (which appear on the sky in the vicinity of Venus).

And Venus was once again moonless.

More recently (2005), two Caltech researchers proposed that Venus had two moons in its early history, both caused by collisions with other bodies. Strong tidal forces from the Sun then caused the moons to be pulled out of orbit.

THAT'S NO MOON....

Quasi-satellites are objects which have a 1:1 mean-motion resonance with their host – that is, the planet and the satellites orbit the Sun in equal amounts of time (rather than the satellite orbiting the planet itself). The most well known examples are the Trojan asteroids of Jupiter.

2002 VE68 was the first quasi-satellite to be discovered around a major planet in the Solar System. It was discovered on November 11, 2002, however the possibility of retrograde or quasi-satellites was first considered in 1913. 2002 VE68 is included in the Minor Planet Center's list of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids as it frequently comes within 0.05AU of the Earth (this is 5% of the average distance from the Earth to the Sun, or about 7.5 million kilometres).

The asteroid also displays near-resonant behaviour with Mercury and the Earth. Simulations suggest that 2002 VE68 has been co-orbital with Venus for about 7,000 years (injected into its present orbit by the action of the Earth), but is likely to be ejected from orbital-resonance with Venus in the next 500 or so years.

Is the Ozone Layer on the Road to Recovery??

Satellites show that the recent ozone hole over Antarctica was the smallest seen in the past decade. Long-term observations also reveal that Earth’s ozone has been strengthening following international agreements to protect this vital layer of the atmosphere.
According to the ozone sensor on Europe’s MetOp weather satellite, the hole over Antarctica in 2012 was the smallest in the last 10 years.

The instrument continues the long-term monitoring of atmospheric ozone started by its predecessors on the ERS-2 and Envisat satellites.

Since the beginning of the 1980s, an ozone hole has developed over Antarctica during the southern spring – September to November – resulting in a decrease in ozone concentration of up to 70%.
Ozone depletion is more extreme in Antarctica than at the North Pole because high wind speeds cause a fast-rotating vortex of cold air, leading to extremely low temperatures. Under these conditions, human-made chlorofluorocar

bons – CFCs – have a stronger effect on the ozone, depleting it and creating the infamous hole.

Over the Arctic, the effect is far less pronounced because the northern hemisphere’s irregular landmasses and mountains normally prevent the build-up of strong circumpolar winds.

Reduced ozone over the southern hemisphere means that people living there are more exposed to cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation.

International agreements on protecting the ozone layer – particularly the Montreal Protocol – have stopped the increase of CFC concentrations, and a drastic fall has been observed since the mid-1990s.

However, the long lifetimes of CFCs in the atmosphere mean it may take until the middle of this century for the stratosphere’s chlorine content to go back to values like those of the 1960s.

The evolution of the ozone layer is affected by the interplay between atmospheric chemistry and dynamics like wind and temperature.

If weather and atmospheric conditions show unusual behaviour, it can result in extreme ozone conditions – such as the record low observed in spring 2011 in the Arctic – or last year’s unusually small Antarctic ozone hole.

Total ozone
To understand these complex processes better, scientists rely on a long time series of data derived from observations and on results from numerical simulations based on complex atmospheric models.

Although ozone has been observed over several decades with multiple instruments, combining the existing observations from many different sensors to produce consistent and homogeneous data suitable for scientific analysis is a difficult task.

Within the ESA Climate Change Initiative, harmonised ozone climate data records are generated to document the variability of ozone changes better at different scales in space and time.

With this information, scientists can better estimate the timing of the ozone layer recovery, and in particular the closure of the ozone hole.

Chemistry climate models show that the ozone layer may be building up, and the hole over Antarctica will close in the next decades.

ISS NIGHTPOD

Any keen photographer knows that shooting in low light conditions can present unique challenges. Imagine then, if you were taking shots from the International Space Station; as well as low light levels you would also have to take into account the ground motion (which often causes blurry images).

Astronauts on the ISS have experimented with high speed film and manual tracking, with mixed results. The European Space Agency then developed NightPod.

NightPod includes a mount system for digital cameras designed to compensate for the motion of the Station relative to the Earth (27,000 km/h). The instrument can be set to auto mode for up to six hours – as a result the crew can take pictures while they sleep.

Pictured here is Liège, Belgium. A network of roadways is clearly seen extending out to the darker Belgian countryside. The image is about 70 km across.

Astronauts often take photographs of significant man made and natural events on the Earth – including storms and volcanic erruptions. These images can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth archive.