Heavens

The sun erupted with another significant flare today, peaking at 10:28 a.m. EDT on Oct. 22, 2014. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured images of the event, which occurred in the lower half of the sun. This flare is classified as an X1.6 class flare. X-class flares denote the most extreme flares. This is the third substantial flare from the same region of the sun since Oct. 19.

New maps of Saturn's moon Titan reveal large patches of trace gases shining brightly near the north and south poles. These regions are curiously shifted off the poles, to the east or west, so that dawn is breaking over the southern region while dusk is falling over the northern one.

The pair of patches was spotted by a NASA-led international team of researchers investigating the chemical make-up of Titan's atmosphere.

While space debris was the uncontrolled adversary in the award-winning space thriller film "Gravity," space debris, also known as "space junk," is an ongoing real-life concern for teams managing satellites orbiting Earth, including NOAA-NASA's Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership, or Suomi NPP, satellite. It is not unusual for satellites that have the capability of maneuvering to be repositioned to avoid debris or to maintain the proper orbit.

Beta Pictoris is a young star located about 63 light-years from the Sun. It is only about 20 million years old and is surrounded by a huge disc of material — a very active young planetary system where gas and dust are produced by the evaporation of comets and the collisions of asteroids.

Flavien Kiefer (IAP/CNRS/UPMC), lead author of the new study sets the scene: "Beta Pictoris is a very exciting target! The detailed observations of its exocomets give us clues to help understand what processes occur in this kind of young planetary system."

Using two world-class supercomputers, the researchers were able to demonstrate the effectiveness of their approach by simulating the formation of a massive galaxy at the dawn of cosmic time. The ALMA radio telescope – which stands at an elevation of 5,000 meters in the Atacama Desert of Chile, one of the driest places on earth – was then used to forge observations of the galaxy, showing how their method improves upon previous efforts.

After 116 days of being subjected to extremely frigid temperatures like that in space, the heart of the James Webb Space Telescope, the Integrated Science Instrument Module (ISIM) and its sensitive instruments, emerged unscathed from the thermal vacuum chamber at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Teams of engineers and technicians have been on heart-monitoring duty around the clock since this complicated assembly was lowered into the chamber for its summer-long test.

College Park, Md. - The supply chain is ground zero for several recent cyber breaches. Hackers, for example, prey on vendors that have remote access to a larger company's global IT systems, software and networks.

In the 2013 Target breach, the attacker infiltrated a vulnerable link: a refrigeration system supplier connected to the retailer's IT system.

A counter-measure, via a user-ready online portal, has been developed by researchers in the Supply Chain Management Center at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business.

Question: When does a Tropical Cyclone drop snowfall?

Answer: When it makes landfall in India and the moisture moves over the Himalayas as Cyclone Hudhud has done. When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the Himalayan Mountains, the MODIS instrument captured this image of snow on the ground on Oct. 16 at 0705 UTC (3:50 a.m. EDT). Cyclone Hudhud made landfall in eastern India and moved over the Himalayas dropping snowfall in Nepal and southwestern China.

DURHAM, N.H. –- Crewed missions to Mars remain an essential goal for NASA, but scientists are only now beginning to understand and characterize the radiation hazards that could make such ventures risky, concludes a new paper by University of New Hampshire scientists.

NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites captured before and after images of Bermuda and surrounding waters before and after Hurricane Gonzalo struck the island on Oct. 17. The images revealed how Gonzalo stirred up the sediment from the ocean bottom.

Slow-moving Tropical Storm Ana was still affecting parts of Hawaii on Oct. 20 when NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead from its orbit in space. Imagery from Aqua showed that wind shear was affecting the storm.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible picture of Tropical Storm Ana over Hawaii on Oct. 20 at 23:55 UTC (7:55 p.m. EDT). The image showed that most of the clouds and showers were north and east of the center of circulation, pushed away from the center by strong southwesterly wind shear.

Massive black holes spewing out radio-frequency-emitting particles at near-light speed can block formation of new stars in aging galaxies, a study has found.

The research provides crucial new evidence that it is these jets of "radio-frequency feedback" streaming from mature galaxies' central black holes that prevent hot free gas from cooling and collapsing into baby stars.

An international team of physicists has measured a subtle characteristic in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background radiation that will allow them to map the large-scale structure of the universe, determine the masses of neutrinos and perhaps uncover some of the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.

PHILADELPHIA – (Oct. 21, 2014) – A team of scientists, led by researchers at The Wistar Institute, has identified a possible explanation for why middle-aged adults were hit especially hard by the H1N1 influenza virus during the 2013-2014 influenza season. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offer evidence that a new mutation in H1N1 viruses potentially led to more disease in these individuals.

NASA's newest orbiter at Mars, MAVEN, took precautions to avoid harm from a dust-spewing comet that flew near Mars today and is studying the flyby's effects on the Red Planet's atmosphere.

The MAVEN spacecraft -- full name Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution -- reported back to Earth in good health after about three hours of precautions against a possible collision with high-velocity dust particles released by comet C/2013 A1 Siding Spring.