Awesomeness Round-up – 8/2/10
- By Maggie Masetti
- August 2, 2010
- Comments Off on Awesomeness Round-up – 8/2/10
We like to kick off the week with a pretty picture! This is Webb’s mirrors, which are being cryo-tested at Marshall.
We had a massive storm in Maryland last week that took out took out Maggie’s power for 8 hours, and Sara’s for a few days! The storm generated nearly hurricane-force winds and killed 3 people… and only lasted about 15 minutes. Earth Observatory has a nice article about it, and whipped together this cool animation (2 MB, QuickTime). With so many satellites watching our weather, it’s always impressive to see the data come together like this.
Want to pick the perfect lunar vacation spot? Tour the Moon with the Clementine spacecraft! This lovely animation takes you to several prominent features of the Moon’s terrain: Tycho crater, the south pole, and the South Pole-Aitken basin.
This spectacular composite image from our friends at the Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the structure of the Sun’s impressive magnetic field. The Sun’s a powerful object, and satellites like SDO are helping us understand how it works and what influence it has in our solar system.
Going, going, gone – Star leaves the Milky Way, originally uploaded by NASA Goddard Photo and Video.
Hubble has spotted a hypervelocity star that’s being kicked out of our galaxy – a former member of a triple-star system that may have wandered too close to the Milky Way’s central black hole. The Hubble folks have seen over a dozen other exiled stars, and it’s allowed them to put together this explanation for how it could have happened:
Triple-star System Passes near Milky Way’s Central Black Hole, originally uploaded by NASA Goddard Photo and Video.
And finally, a wintry blast from the past: an animation from GEOS-5 data that shows the one-two punch of this year’s East Coast snowpocalypse! Those of us who live near Goddard have gotten a lot of exciting weather this year – several feet of snow, intense heat waves, and hurricane-strength winds. Maryland gets a sample of all of the country’s weather, and that keeps things interesting.
