NASA Helps With California’s Record Drought.

Although a lot of rain fell on the Golden State this past week, NASA says that California will need 11 trillion gallons of water to end the drought throughout the state.

The darker the color, the more severe the drought conditions are in those locations.  The dark red pretty much follows the Mojave desert that dumps out in the Los Angeles basin.

So it isn’t a big suprise that areas like Death Valley don’t have a lot of water in the first place.

 

The impressive part of this, is that NASA made this first every calculation based on satellite data, some from the Aqua satellite above.

“Spaceborne and airborne measurements of Earth’s changing shape, surface height and gravity field now allow us to measure and analyze key features of droughts better than ever before, including determining precisely when they begin and end and what their magnitude is at any moment in time.

Other NASA satellite data showed that the snowpack in California’s Sierra Nevada range is only half previous estimates.  “The 2014 snowpack was one of the three lowest on record and the worst since 1977, when California’s population was half what it is now,” said Airborne Snow Observatory principal investigator Tom Painter.

 

– Ex astris, scientia –

I am and avid amateur astronomer and intellectual property attorney in Pasadena, California and I am a Rising Star as rated by Super Lawyers Magazine.  As a former Chief Petty Officer in the U.S. Navy, I am a proud member of the Armed Service Committee of the Los Angeles County Bar Association working to aid all active duty and veterans in our communities. Connect with me on Google +, or by email.

Norman

Another Hibernating Spacecraft Wakes Up.

After nine years and a journey of 3 billion miles (4.8 billion km), NASA’s New Horizons robotic probe awoke from hibernation to begin its mission to study the planet Pluto and other worlds in the Kuiper Belt.

A pre-set alarm clock awoke New Horizons at 3 p.m. EST, and 6 1/2 hours later, NASA’s ground control team got the confirmation.  This craft is waaaay out there.  Each astronomical unit is equal to about 93 million miles (149.6 million kilometers) and it is traveling at a speed of about 0.62 miles per second, or 2,237 miles per hour.

Yes, that is faster (way faster) than a speeding bullet.

As fast as the craft is going, there will only be a flyby of Pluto, the planet, before it heads deeper into the Kuiper Belt on its way out of the solar system.

Since its discovery in 1930, Pluto has been a mystery. Scientists have difficulty explaining why a planet with a radius of just 740 miles (1,190 km) – about half the width of the United States, with 5 known moons, could come to exist beyond the giant worlds of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

This is one expedition I have looked forward to for years.  I can’t wait to find out what we discover out there.

– Ex astris, scientia –

I am and avid amateur astronomer and intellectual property attorney in Pasadena, California and I am a Rising Star as rated by Super Lawyers Magazine.  As a former Chief Petty Officer in the U.S. Navy, I am a proud member of the Armed Service Committee of the Los Angeles County Bar Association working to aid all active duty and veterans in our communities. Connect with me on Google +, or by email.

Norman

The Brightest Pulsar Ever Found.

Pulsars (short for pulsating radio stars) are highly magnetized, regularly rotating neutron stars that emit a beam of electromagnetic radiation that can only be observed when the beam is pointing toward Earth (like a lighthouse).

They are so regular that astronomers use their spin as timers so that they can find distances of objects around the universe.

Astronomers have now detected a pulsar that appears to be burning with the energy of 10 million suns, making it the brightest pulsar ever detected.

Found in the galaxy Messier 82 (M82, or the The Cigar Galaxy on the left) is a galactic neighbor only 12 million light-years from Earth.

It is so bright in fact that it is classified as an ultraluminous X-ray (ULX) source.  It is so bright that it defies any known process of stellar radiation and exceeds the Eddington luminosity or the Eddington limit, which is the maximum luminosity a stellar body (such as a star) can achieve.

For being so bright, this pulsar is not much larger in diameter than the city of Boston, but is more than three times the mass of the sun.

“There are a number of ULX sources known, and until now, most people have assumed that they are black holes, and pretty massive,” says Deepto Chakrabarty, a professor of physics and head of the astrophysics division at MIT. “Now there may be other, similar ULX pulsars. And that would mean the whole picture that was being built up to try and explain this whole class of weird objects is wrong.”

The pulsar was found using NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), a pair of orbiting telescopes that detects high-energy X-rays from far-off galaxies.

– Ex astris, scientia –

I am and avid amateur astronomer and intellectual property attorney in Pasadena, California and I am a Rising Star as rated by Super Lawyers Magazine.  As a former Chief Petty Officer in the U.S. Navy, I am a proud member of the Armed Service Committee of the Los Angeles County Bar Association working to aid all active duty and veterans in our communities. Connect with me on Google +, or by email.

Norman

An Astronomical PSA.

I saw another post about this video and decided to check it out.  You should too. The PSA (public service announcement), titled “Reach”, is from NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate.

Karen O. Lau and David E. Sanders created the original “Reach” PSA in 2003 as part of the NASA Means Business competition.

The PSA has been shown on NASA-TV and the National Geographic Channel, on university stations and will soon be seen Regal theaters across the country.

 

This is doubly impressive because Art Center College of Design is one of my clients and you have no idea how many crazy talented people attend school there.  It really is an amazing institution.

You can download the video here.

– Ex astris, scientia –

I am and avid amateur astronomer and intellectual property attorney in Pasadena, California and I am a Rising Star as rated by Super Lawyers Magazine.  As a former Chief Petty Officer in the U.S. Navy, I am a proud member of the Armed Service Committee of the Los Angeles County Bar Association working to aid all active duty and veterans in our communities. Connect with me on Google +

Norman

Fall Down And Go Boom!

If you hadn’t heard, yesterday an Antares rocket built by Orbital Sciences Corp. blew up during takeoff from the Virginia spaceport.

First, things like this will happen until we find a better way of launching objects (and people) into orbit.

I think Steve Buscemi’s character Rockhound in the (much maligned) film Armageddon said it best: “You know we’re sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder. Makes you feel good, doesn’t it?”

A lot of things can go wrong when you are basically lighting a giant bottle rocket to take you to space.

This was to be Orbital’s third mission to launch a Cygnus resupply craft to the ISS.  After the investigation as to what went wrong, Orbital will send up another craft.

Still, we need to find a better way to get to space.  Current spacecraft are expensive and mostly single use.  We need to invest in something better.

 

– Ex astris, scientia –

I am and avid amateur astronomer and intellectual property attorney in Pasadena, California and I am a Rising Star as rated by Super Lawyers Magazine.  As a former Chief Petty Officer in the U.S. Navy, I am a proud member of the Armed Service Committee of the Los Angeles County Bar Association working to aid all active duty and veterans in our communities. Connect with me on Google +

Norman

Top Secret Space Plane Returns From 2 Year Mission.

After  NASA shut down the space shuttle program, the U.S. was left with no re-usable spacecraft.  We have plenty of rockets, but nothing quite as useful as the shuttles.

Evidently, the military felt the same way.  The Air Force has been working on the X-37B un-manned spacecraft for almost a decade since it was turned over to them in 2004 by NASA.  The X-37B is the smallest space plane launched to date.

It is 1/20th the scale of its big brother the Boeing X-40A and its purpose isn’t known.

The spacecraft has spent an incredible 674 days in orbit and has recently landed.

The Air Force has acknowledged plans to build the X-37C which would be capable of carrying 6 crew to orbit.  Perhaps this is a competitor to the commercial ventures trying to get those contracts.  Who knows.  But two years in space seems to be a really excessive trial run for a space ferry.  Just sayin.  But it would be nice to have a shuttle program again.

– Ex astris, scientia –

I am and avid amateur astronomer and intellectual property attorney in Pasadena, California and I am a Rising Star as rated by Super Lawyers Magazine.  As a former Chief Petty Officer in the U.S. Navy, I am a proud member of the Armed Service Committee of the Los Angeles County Bar Association working to aid all active duty and veterans in our communities. Connect with me on Google +

Norman