Infrared satellite imagery from shows how cold cloud top temperatures are in a tropical cyclone, and recent imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite shows the cloud-top temperatures have been warming in Tropical Storm 13W. Warming cloud top temperatures indicate less strength, and Tropical Storm 13W is weakening.
Heavens
The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance orbiter captured this picture of the Curiosity rover still connected to its parachute as it descended towards its landing site at Gale Crater on Mars.
The image was taken while MRO was 211 miles (340 kilometers) away from the parachuting rover. Curiosity and its rocket-propelled backpack had yet to be deployed. At the time, Curiosity was about two miles above the Martian surface.
NOAA's GOES-13 satellite has been continuously providing imagery of Ernesto. A visible image of Tropical Storm Ernesto from GOES-13 on August 6 at 11:45 a.m. EDT showed an organized, rounded storm with strong convection (rising air that forms the thunderstorms that make up a tropical cyclone).
When NASA's Aqua satellite captured an infrared view of the northwestern Pacific's latest tropical storm, Tropical Storm 13W, the data revealed the bulk of the heavy rainfall on the northern side of the center.
NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Storm 13W on August 6 at 0205 UTC (Aug. 5 10:05 a.m. EDT). The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument captured an infrared image of the cloud temperatures that showed the strongest storms (purple) and heaviest rainfall north and east of the center of circulation.
The sixth tropical storm of the Atlantic Ocean hurricane season formed over the past weekend, and NASA kept an on its progression. Tropical Storm Florence was born in the eastern Atlantic and weakened when it interacted with dry air.
Two NASA satellites have captured data on the activity of Typhoon Haikui as it nears the China coast. NASA's Terra satellite provided a visible look at the storm, while NASA's Aqua satellite investigated it in infrared light. Both showed some strong thunderstorms within that were likely packing heavy rainfall.
A new statistical analysis by NASA scientists has found that Earth's land areas have become much more likely to experience an extreme summer heat wave than they were in the middle of the 20th century. The research was published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The fifth Atlantic Ocean tropical depression strengthened into Tropical Storm Ernesto on Thursday, August 2 at 5 p.m. EDT and tracked over St. Lucia early on August 3. NASA's Terra satellite captured an image of Ernesto from space as it approached the island.
The AIRS image caught the western edge of Tropical Depression Haikui, and it showed a large area of very cold cloud top temperatures, indicating a lot of strength in uplift and strong, high thunderstorms. A good portion of Haikui's cloud top temperatures were as cold as -63 Fahrenheit (-52 Celsius). Those strong storms are indicative of areas where heavy rain is falling. Satellite imagery revealed that the low-level circulation center is partly exposed. There is also a fragmented, banding of thunderstorms wrapping from the northeast quadrant into the northwest quadrant of the storm.
Washington, D.C.—Type Ia supernovae are violent stellar explosions. Observations of their brightness are used to determine distances in the universe and have shown scientists that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. But there is still too little known about the specifics of the processes by which these supernovae form. New research led by Carnegie's Stella Kafka identifies a star, prior to explosion, which will possibly become a type Ia supernova. The work will be published by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and is available online.
Salmon conservation shouldn't narrowly focus on managing flows in streams and rivers or on preserving only places that currently have strong salmon runs.
Instead, watersheds need a good mix of steep, cold-running streams and slower, meandering streams of warmer water to keep options open for salmon adapted to reproduce better in one setting than the other, new research shows.Preserving that sort of varied landscape serves not just salmon, it provides an all-summer buffet that brown bears, gulls and other animals need to sustain themselves the rest of the year.
Earlier this year, astronomers discovered a quiescent black hole in a distant galaxy that erupted after shredding and consuming a passing star. Now researchers have identified a distinctive X-ray signal observed in the days following the outburst that comes from matter on the verge of falling into the black hole.
In science fiction novels, evil overlords and hostile aliens often threaten to vaporize the Earth. At the beginning of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the officiously bureaucratic aliens called Vogons, authors of the third-worst poetry in the universe, actually follow through on the threat, destroying the Earth to make way for a hyperspatial express route.
Tropical Storm Saola and Typhoon Damrey appear on NASA satellite imagery to be arm-in-arm as they enter China on August 2.
Washington, D.C. — For decades it has been thought that a shock wave from a supernova explosion triggered the formation of our Solar System. According to this theory, the shock wave also injected material from the exploding star into a cloud of dust and gas, and the newly polluted cloud collapsed to form the Sun and its surrounding planets. New work from Carnegie's Alan Boss and Sandra Keiser provides the first fully three-dimensional (3-D) models for how this process could have happened. Their work will be published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters.