Sunday, October 6, 2013

NASA videos from just before the shutdown

It's time for one last comprehensive space summary until the shutdown is over.  All of the following were originally included in Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday (ACA and shutdown on campus) on Daily Kos.

NASA Television: Three New ISS Residents on This Week @NASA

The International Space Station has three new residents. Expedition 37/38 Soyuz Commander Oleg Kotov, Flight Engineer Sergey Ryazanskiy and NASA Flight Engineer Michael Hopkins arrived six hours after launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. They'll spend a portion of their five-and-a-half months in space with station Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and Flight Engineers Karen Nyberg of NASA and Luca Parmitano who've been on the station since late May. Also, Heartbeat Finder, Orion Simulations, SLS Model Tested, Lander Prototype, Seeing Shockwaves, a very special NASA Anniversary and more!
Science at NASA: ScienceCasts: Amateur Astonomers See Comet ISON Approaching the Sun

Comet ISON is still more than two months away from its spectacular close encounter with the sun. Already, the brightening comet has become a good target for backyard telescopes in the pre-dawn sky.
JPL/NASA: What's Up for October 2013

Juno flies by Earth Oct 9, Observe The Moon Night Oct 12, and glimpse the Moons far side.
Finally, here's one that I should have included in Climate news from NASA, IPCC, and University of Alabama.

NASA Explorer: IPCC Projections of Temperature and Precipitation in the 21st Century

New data visualizations from the NASA Center for Climate Simulation and NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio show how climate models -- those used in the new report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- estimate how temperature and precipitation patterns could change throughout the 21st century.
For the IPCC's Physical Science Basis and Summary for Policymakers reports, scientists referenced an international climate modeling effort to study how the Earth might respond to four different scenarios of how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases would be emitted into the atmosphere throughout the 21st century.

The Summary for Policymakers, the first official piece of the group's Fifth Assessment Report, was released Fri., Sept. 27.

That modeling effort, called the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5), includes dozens of climate models from institutions around the world, including from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

To produce visualizations that show temperature and precipitation changes similar to those included in the IPCC report, the NASA Center for Climate Simulation calculated mean model results for each of the four emissions scenarios. The final products are visual representations how much temperature and precipitation patterns would change through 2100 compared to the historical average from the end of the 20th century. The changes shown compare the model projections to the average temperature and precipitation benchmarks observed from 1971-2000. This baseline is different from the IPCC report, which uses a 1986-2005 baseline. Because the reference period from 1986-2005 was slightly warmer than 1971-2000, the visualizations are slightly different than those in the report, even though the same model data is used.
And that's it from NASA on YouTube until the end of the U.S. government shutdown.  May it be over soon.  Otherwise, this could be the next step in the classic tragic science fiction plot of a civilization losing its ability to go to space.

No comments:

Post a Comment