Scientists to Fire Spacecraft at Asteroid in Earth Defence Test
Scientists plan to fire a spacecraft into an asteroid in an effort to prepare for one being on a direct collision course with Earth. The news came as Nasa moved to dismiss claims that a comet was already hurtling towards our planet. Plans for a test mission to prevent an asteroid colliding with Earth come [...]
NASA Says Comet Elenin Will Have No Impact on Earth
Astronomers and other space enthusiasts have long pondered the question of whether a massive Comet, named Elenin, could hit earth or take control of the planet’s polarity away from the sun in late 2011. In fact, websites dedicated to the comet have been set up while internet forums are awash with suggestions that NASA [...]
Solar Flare Activity Prompting NASA to Convene a News Briefing Thursday in Washington
Increasing solar activity and the threat that coronal mass ejections (CME) pose to Earth has prompted NASA to convene a news briefing at its Headquarter building in Washington on Thursday afternoon. Thursday’s briefing has been arranged, space agency officials say, in light of new information coming from NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), spacecraft and [...]
Sun Erupts A Massive Class X-6.9 Solar Flare
An extremely powerful solar flare, the largest in over four years, rocked the sun early Tuesday (Aug. 9), but is unlikely to wreak any serious havoc here on Earth, scientists say. “It was a big flare,” said Joe Kunches, a space scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s Space Weather Prediction Center. “We [...]
Third Solar Storm Hurtles Towards Earth: Power Outages a Possibility
US Space weather scientists have predicted that large sun explosion over the last few days could affect communications and global positioning system (GPS) satellites. Three large solar explosions from the Sun are threatening to cause chaos on earth, with energy from the release potentially shutting down communications systems and power grids across the world. The [...]
Solar Storms are Brewing, Possibility of Electrical Grid Failure
Storms are brewing about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) away, and if one of them reaches Earth, it could knock out communications, scramble GPS, and leave thousands without power for weeks to months. The tempest is what’s known as a solar storm, a flurry of charged particles that erupts from the sun. Under the [...]
Massive Sunspot 1263 Forms-Wider than the Earth!
Double sunspot 1263 is a whopper. Its two dark cores are each wider than Earth, and the entire region stretches more than 65,000 km from end to end. Yesterday in the Netherlands, Emil Kraaikamp took advantage of a break in the clouds and “a few moments of steady air” to capture this magnificent photo: “To [...]
Mystery Flash of X-rays Reveals Plasma Blobs as Big as Planets Exploding on Sun
On June 7, 2011, Earth-orbiting satellites detected a flash of X-rays coming from the western edge of the solar disk. Registering only “M” (for medium) on the Richter scale of solar flares, the blast at first appeared to be a minor eruption until researchers studied the video images. “We’d never seen anything like it,” says [...]
Giant Asteroid to ‘Narrowly Miss’ Earth Monday
A newly discovered asteroid the size of an office block will narrowly miss the Earth on Monday - coming 23 times closer than the moon. The space rock will reach within 11,000 miles of the its surface and give off a light bright enough to be seen through a small telescope, experts said today. It [...]
U.S., Russia Fight Over Asteroid That Could Destroy Earth
BARELY two weeks after the failure of a doomsday prediction by a United States (U.S.) based preacher, Russia and U.S. scientists are at war over another perceived threat to human existence. The danger this time is not an apocalyptic occurrence, but the smacking of the Earth by a giant asteroid in five months time. The [...]
