Heavens

26 August 2014 - A team of engineers from Singapore has successfully piloted the world's first ZigBee wireless sensor network (WSN) for satellite communications.

With the weight of payloads being a major constraint in satellite design, constructing a lightweight, low power-consuming, wireless communication system to do away with cabling inside the satellite has always been a challenge for system designers.

According to the Department of Fire and Emergency Services of Western Australia, a bushfire ADVICE remains for people travelling along Great Northern Highway approximately 20 kilometres east of Broome, and Cape Leveque Road approximately 40 kilometres north of Broome, in the Shire of Broome. There is no threat to lives or homes but there is a lot of smoke in the area. There is a complex of fires burning in the area on both sides of Great Northern Highway, near the Roebuck Roadhouse.

Updates from NWTfire.com report that there are 133 active fires in the North Slave Region of the Northwest Territories. No new fires reported in the past 24 hours. Fire danger is moderate to high. Smoke may be an issue in some communities.

The Happy Camp Complex of fires began as a lightning strike on August 12, 2014. Currently the fire has consumed 22,670 acres and is 20% contained. There are close to 2,000 personnel working on this fire at present. It consists of many small fires and a number of large ones. Most of the small fires have been contained and only account for about 100 acres. An inversion layer settled over the fire area throughout the morning and early afternoon on August 24, keeping fire activity moderate. As the inversion lifted in the afternoon, fire activity continued to the south.

Engineers at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have successfully piloted the world's first ZigBee-based inter-satellite communication system.

The team at the Satellite Research Centre launched the VELOX-I, which consists of a nanosatellite weighing 3.5 kg and a piggyback picosatellite weighing 1.5 kg, from the two highest points on campus. Both miniature satellites were configured with a ZigBee wireless network and equipped with small sensor nodes that perform functions such as local sensing, distributed computing and data-gathering.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Research by Indiana University geologists suggests that an intermediate amount of vegetation -- not too little and not too much -- is most effective at stabilizing freshwater river deltas.

The study, "Optimum vegetation height and density for inorganic sedimentation in deltaic marshes," was published online Aug. 24 by Nature Geoscience. The findings may help guide restoration of river deltas, such as those near the mouth of the Mississippi River, which are under threat as sea levels rise.

NASA's TRMM satellite saw Tropical Storm Karina get a boost on August 22 in the form of some moderate rainfall and towering thunderstorms in the center of the storm.

Although Tropical Storm Lowell is not over land the storm is large enough to cause strong ocean swells in Baja California. NASA's Terra satellite passed over Lowell and captured an image that shows how it dwarfed Tropical Storm Karina.

The National Hurricane Center noted that swells generated by Lowell will affect the west coast of the Baja California, Mexico, peninsula and portions of the coast of southern California through the weekend of August 23 and 24. These swells are likely to cause life-threatening surf and rip current conditions.

Powerful thunderstorms in newborn Tropical Storm Marie were seen stretching toward the top of the troposphere in infrared imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite.

New research by a team of UK and European-based astronomers is helping to solve the mystery of what caused a spectacular supernova in a galaxy 11 million light years away, seen earlier this year.

The supernova, a giant explosion of a star and the closest one to the Earth in decades, was discovered earlier this year by chance at the University of London Observatory. These phenomena are extremely important to study because they provide key information about our universe, including how it is expanding and how galaxies evolve.

The moon appears to be a tranquil place, but modeling done by University of New Hampshire (UNH) and NASA scientists suggests that, over the eons, periodic storms of solar energetic particles may have significantly altered the properties of the soil in the moon's coldest craters through the process of sparking—a finding that could change our understanding of the evolution of planetary surfaces in the solar system.

In this animation, the Earth rotates slowly as the Arctic sea ice advances over time from March 21, 2014 to August 3, 2014.

(Photo Credit: NASA)

Source: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Following rapid warming in the late 20th century, this century has so far seen surprisingly little increase in the average temperature at the Earth's surface. At first this was a blip, then a trend, then a puzzle for the climate science community.

Lowell is now a large hurricane in the Eastern Pacific and NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites double-teamed it to provide infrared and radar data to scientists. Lowell strengthened into a hurricane during the morning hours of August 21.

The fluorine that is found in products such as toothpaste was likely formed billions of years ago in now dead stars of the same type as our sun. This has been shown by astronomers at Lund University in Sweden, together with colleagues from Ireland and the USA.