Heavens

Researchers with NASA's Operation IceBridge have completed another successful Arctic field campaign. On May 23, NASA's P-3 research aircraft left Thule Air Base, Greenland, and returned to Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia marking the end of 11 weeks of polar research.

Hurricane Amanda has weakened to a tropical storm, but not before NASA's TRMM satellite took a look under its clouds at the rate of heavy rainfall it was generating. After weakening to a tropical storm, NASA's Aqua satellite identified that those strong thunderstorms were limited to the area around the center of its circulation.

The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite known as TRMM passed over Amanda on Saturday May 24, 2014 at 2150 UTC (5:50 p.m. EDT). TRMM is a joint mission between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency known as JAXA.

The tropical low pressure area known as System 92B finally dissipated on the east central coast of India on May 27 after six days of struggling to develop. System 92B developed in the Bay of Bengal, Northern Indian Ocean basin on May 21. NASA's TRMM, Aqua and Suomi NPP satellites captured data on the low throughout the ups and downs it experienced until wind shear finally took its toll on the system.

Swimming fish do not appear to use their collision warning system in the same way as flying insects, according to new research from Lund University in Sweden that has compared how zebra fish and bumblebees avoid collisions. The fish surprised the researchers.

A recent review of hundreds of chemical analyses of Moon rocks indicates that the amount of water in the Moon's interior varies regionally – revealing clues about how water originated and was redistributed in the Moon. These discoveries provide a new tool to unravel the processes involved in the formation of the Moon, how the lunar crust cooled, and its impact history.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The slopes of a giant Martian volcano, once covered in glacial ice, may have been home to one of the most recent habitable environments yet found on the Red Planet, according to new research led by Brown University geologists.

NASA's Terra satellite passed over the central Alaska and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument that flies aboard captured an image of smoke and hot spots from the Funny River Fire in southern Alaska on May 26 at 21:45 UTC (5:45 p.m. EDT). The heat from the fire appears red in the imagery and the smoke appears light brown.

Ordinarily, deaf students are left in the dark when they visit a planetarium.

With the lights off, they can't see the ASL interpreter who narrates their tour of outer space. With the lights on, they can't see the constellations of stars projected overhead.

That's why a group at Brigham Young University launched the "Signglasses" project. Professor Mike Jones and his students have developed a system to project the sign language narration onto several types of glasses – including Google Glass.

The winds have shifted and the Slide Fire smoke that once hung heavy and gray over Flagstaff is now covering the city of Sedona in Arizona. Over 20,000 acres have burned in the Coconino Forest in Arizona. Inciweb.org reports that during Memorial Day crews completed the final perimeter burnout around the fire. This perimeter created by the fire crews is approximately 40 miles of line to form a containment perimeter around the fire. The fire is considered 35 percent contained at this point.

This news release is available in French.

Montreal, May 27, 2014 — Retail stores overflowing with merchandise can make consumers feel claustrophobic rather than ready to spend. But the recent move towards open, minimally stocked spaces can leave them feeling just as anxious.

The solution to this shopping conundrum may be smell, as new research from Concordia University shows.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- A new illustration of the seafloor, created by two of the world's leading ocean floor mapping experts that details underwater terrain where the missing Malaysia Airlines flight might be located, could shed additional light on what type of underwater vehicles might be used to find the missing airplane and where any debris from the crash might lie.

System 92B appears to have weakened in the last day as an infrared look at the tropical low pressure area's cloud temperatures have shown. NASA's AIRS instrument is an infrared "eye in the sky" that recently flew over the weaker tropical low pressure area.

The Slide Fire is located in Oak Creek Canyon just north of Slide Rock State Park and burning northward, up the canyon into places such as West Fork and Harding Point. Currently it has burned 7,500 acres and is 5% contained. The fire originated just about 4 to 5 miles north of Sedona, just north of Slide Rock State Park on May 20, and was human caused. Investigations regarding the cause are ongoing.

Like a bullet wrapped in a full metal jacket, a high-velocity hydrogen cloud hurtling toward the Milky Way appears to be encased in a shell of dark matter, according to a new analysis of data from the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT). Astronomers believe that without this protective shell, the high-velocity cloud (HVC) known as the Smith Cloud would have disintegrated long ago when it first collided with the disk of our Galaxy.

One week after the official start of hurricane season in the Eastern Pacific Ocean, the first tropical depression was born hundreds of miles southwest of Mexico. NASA's TRMM satellite and NOAA's GOES-West satellites provided looks inside and outside of the depression's clouds. Hurricane season in the Eastern Pacific began officially on May 15.