A G1 (Minor) geomagnetic storm watch is now in effect for the 14 and 15 March, 2018 UTC-days. The arrival of a co-rotating interaction region (CIR), followed by a recurrent, negative polarity coronal hole high speed stream (CH HSS) is expected to cause the escalated geomagnetic responses. Keep visiting the nation’s official source for space weather forecasts, warnings, and alerts athttp://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ for the latest information and updates.
After reviewing several observational datasets, the NWS can confirm the flash and boom was NOT thunder or lightning, but instead a likely meteor. We continue to monitor feeds from astronomical agencies for official confirmation of a meteor. #miwx
Photo: The Soyuz MS-07 rocket is launched with Expedition 54 Soyuz Commander Anton Shkaplerov of Roscosmos, flight engineer Scott Tingle of NASA, and flight engineer Norishige Kanai of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Sunday, Dec. 17, 2017 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Shkaplerov, Tingle, and Kanai will spend the next five months living and working aboard the International Space Station. Photo Credit: (NASA/Joel Kowsky)
Expedition 54 flight engineer Scott Tingle of NASA, top, flight engineer Norishige Kanai of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), middle, and Soyuz Commander Anton Shkaplerov of Roscosmos, bottom, wave farewell prior to boarding the Soyuz MS-07 rocket for launch, Sunday, Dec. 17, 2017 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Tingle, Norishige Kanai, and Shkaplerov will spend the next five months living and working aboard the International Space Station. Photo Credit: (NASA/Joel Kowsky)
Three crew members representing the United States, Russia and Japan are on their way to the International Space Station after launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 2:21 a.m. EST Sunday (1:21 p.m. Baikonur time).
The Soyuz spacecraft carrying NASA’s Scott Tingle, Anton Shkaplerov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, and Norishige Kanai of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency is scheduled to dock to the space station’s Rassvet module at 3:43 a.m. Tuesday, Dec. 19. Coverage of docking will begin at 3 a.m. on NASA Television and the agency’s website, followed at 5 a.m. by coverage of the opening of hatches between the spacecraft and station.
The arrival of Tingle, Shkaplerov and Kanai will restore the station’s crew complement to six. They will join Expedition 54 Commander Alexander Misurkin of Roscosmos and his crewmates, Mark Vande Hei and Joe Acaba of NASA. The crew members will spend more than four months conducting approximately 250 science investigations in fields such as biology, Earth science, human research, physical sciences and technology development.
Vande Hei, Acaba and Misurkin are scheduled to remain aboard the station until February 2018, and Tingle, Shkaplerov and Kanai are scheduled to return to Earth in April.
This crew continues the long-term increase in crew size on the U.S. segment from three to four, allowing NASA to maximize time dedicated to research on the space station. Highlights of upcoming investigations include demonstrating the benefits of manufacturing fiber optic filaments in a microgravity environment, a new study looking at structures that are vital to the design of advanced optical materials and electronic devices and examining a drug compound and drug delivery system designed to combat muscular breakdown in space or during other prolonged periods of disuse, such as extended bed rest on Earth.
For more than 17 years, humans have lived and worked continuously aboard the station, advancing scientific knowledge and demonstrating new technologies, making research breakthroughs not possible on Earth that will enable long-duration human and robotic exploration into deep space. A global endeavor, more than 200 people from 18 countries have visited the unique microgravity laboratory that has hosted more than 2,100 research investigations from researchers in more than 95 countries.
While rapture-ready folks are celebrating today, the flyby of 3200 Phaeton has been known for years and is not considered a threat to our survival by science. One YouTube video even explains that 3200 Phaeton proves Barack Obama is the anti-Christ due to Oprah declaring he is “the one” on some tangentially associated date and that Phaeton sounds like Python–more proof–and that Phaeton is a destroyer in mythology, and, and…) In fact, NASA recently explained Phaeton in connection with the Geminids Meteor Shower which peaked December 13-14, 2017.
“About the Geminid Shower The Geminids are active every December, when Earth passes through a massive trail of dusty debris shed by a weird, rocky object named 3200 Phaethon. The dust and grit burn up when they run into Earth’s atmosphere in a flurry of “shooting stars.”
“Phaethon’s nature is debated,” said Cooke. “It’s either a near-Earth asteroid or an extinct comet, sometimes called a rock comet.”
As an added bonus this year, astronomers will have a chance to study Phaethon up close in mid-December, when it passes nearest to Earth since its discovery in 1983.”
Asteroid Phaethon NASA Fact Sheet 12.13.10
The Geminids are a unique meteor shower in that their identified parent body is not a comet, but what seems to be an asteroid! Of the meteor showers with known parent bodies studied by meteor scientists, the Geminids are the only shower to have an asteroidal parent body; all others have a cometary origin. 3200 Phaethon measures 5.10 km in diameter which increases the ‘unique’ factor; considering the amount of debris we see, we would expect Phaethon to be a much larger body!
Phaethon was discovered on October 11, 1983 using the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, and named after the Greek myth of Phaethon, son of the sun god Helios, due to its close approach to our Sun.
Phaethon is technically classified as an asteroid — the first to be discovered via satellite. But how could an asteroid produce meteoroids that cause the Geminids? One theory is that Phaethon broke apart from another object, ejecting meteoroids as a part of the breakup. This doesn’t agree with other things we know, however. Another theory is that a collision with another object thousands of years ago could have produced debris that Earth now travels through. This theory appears to be unlikely as well, based on other evidence. Another theory assumes Phaethon to be a dead comet (the spent nucleus of a comet whose ices had been sublimated away) that produced debris in the past that now intersects Earth’s orbit. But no evidence for mass loss from the object has ever been reported…. until recently. In 2009 the NASA spacecraft STEREO-A observed 3200 Phaethon to brighten by a factor of two, quite unexpectedly. This brightening at perihelion was likely due to a release of dust from the object, possibly due to heating and cracking of the surface rocks as Phaethon came close to the Sun. That brings us to the fourth theory, that Phaethon is a rock comet. The problem with this theory is that it doesn’t account for the amount of dust in the Geminid stream.
So what it comes down to is that the Geminid parent object is a mystery.
More FACTS:
Goldstone Radar Observations Planning: Asteroid 3200 Phaethon
3200 Phaethon
3200 Phaethon (1983 TB) was discovered on 1983 Oct. 11 by NASA's Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS).
With a diameter of about 5 km, Phaethon is the third largest near-Earth asteroid classified as "Potentially Hazardous"
after 53319 1999 JM8 (~7 km) and 4183 Cuno (~5.6 km).
Phaethon has an unusually high eccentricity of 0.890 and a perihelion of 0.140 au
that is among the smallest known in the near-Earth asteroid population. Due to the close perihelion,
Phaethon is named for the Greek mythological son of Helios (the Sun god). In Greek mythology, Phaethon
drove his father's chariot for one day, lost control of its horses, and nearly set the Earth on fire.
Phaethon will approach within 0.069 au of Earth on 2017 December 16 when it will be a strong
radar imaging target at Goldstone and Arecibo. This will be the best opportunity to date for radar observations
of this asteroid and we hope to obtain detailed images with resolutions as fine as 75 m/pixel at Goldstone
and 15 m/pixel at Arecibo. The images should be excellent for obtaining a detailed 3D model.
Extensive photometric observations by many observers have yielded a rotation period of 3.6 h, a lightcurve amplitude
of up to ~0.4 mag, and a pole direction of (lambda, beta) = (85+- 13, -20+-10) deg (Ansdell et al. 2014).
Ansdell et al. also obtained axis ratios of x/y = 1.04 and x/z = 1.14, so Phaethon appears relatively unelongated
along its equator but somewhat flattened at its poles.
Spectroscopic observations by several observing teams strongly suggest that Phaethon is an optically-dark B-class
object. However, thermal infrared observations dating back to the 1990s by Harris et al. give an optical
albedo of 0.11 that seems somewhat bright for the B class. More recent observations by NASA's NEOWISE
mission have detected Phaethon and could provide an update on the diameter and albedo.
Phaethon was detected by radar at Arecibo in December 2007. Due to equipment problems, the 2007 data
consist of a modest number of echo power spectra and a handful of delay-Doppler images from two days.
Echo power spectra obtained at Arecibo in 2007 were strong and provided a maximum bandwidth of 44 Hz.
Combined with the rotation period of 3.6 h, the bandwidth places a lower bound on the maximum pole-on dimension
of about 5.7 km. The 2007 delay-Doppler images show a rounded object, which is consistent with the shape of the echo
power spectra, but were relatively weak and do not show detailed surface features.
The 2007 Arecibo observations have a radar cross section of about 2.4 km^2, that, if we adopt a diameter of
5.1 km, imply a radar albedo of 0.12. As such, the SNRs in the tables below could be too low by about 20%.
Phaethon is widely thought to be the parent body for the Geminids meteor stream due to similarities between
its orbit and that of the meteors (Whipple 1983; Williams and Wu 1993). Most meteor streams are associated with comets,
so this raises the question of whether Phaethon could be an inactive comet nucleus.
Observations by Jewitt and colleagues have revealed episodic activity by Phaethon, but have not, to date,
shown the signature of particles as large as those in the Geminids meteors. The implication is that Phaethon
experiences occasional outbursts that produce particles far larger than any seen so far. As such, Phaethon is an unusual
object that appears asteroidal most of the time but occasionally shows low levels of activity when it is
near perihleion. Phaethon is classified as an asteroid,
not as a comet, and despite the high eccentricity, the object's Tisserand parameter is not cometary.
The 2017 apparition is the closest to Earth since the asteroid's discovery
so it may be possible for optical observers to detect new activity. If Phaethon shows
unexpectedly strong activity in 2017, then there is a small (perhaps very small) chance that CW radar observations
might reveal echoes from a cloud of small particles similar to the "skirts" seen in radar observations of
active comet nuclei.
The very low perihelion of Phaethon makes it a possible candidate for detecting general relativistic
and/or solar oblateness effects in its orbital motion (Margot and Giorgini 2010), so one of our principal
objectives is to obtain high-resolution radar ranging measurements to support this effort.
Phaethon will be brighter than 16th magnitude for about one month from November-December 2017.
Phaethon is predicted to reach 11th magnitude in mid-December when it will be visible in small telescopes
for experienced observers at sites with dark skies.
Phaethon is potentially detectable at Goldstone for about three weeks and tracks are scheduled on
ten days between Dec. 11-21.
Due to its relatively rapid motion in declination, Phaethon is visible at Arecibo on only five days
from Dec. 15-19 and observations are scheduled on all of those dates.
We may also request time at Green Bank to receive Goldstone transmissions.
The 2017 encounter is the closest by this asteroid since 1974 and until 2093.
Phaethon is classified as a "Potentially Hazardous Asteroid" by the Minor Planet Center.
Orbital and Physical Characteristics
Name Phaethon
Number 3200
Discoverer IRAS
Discovery date 1983 Oct 11
orbit type Apollo
Close approach date 2017 Dec 16
Close approach dist. 0.0689 au
Close approach dist. 26.8 lunar distances
semimajor axis 1.271 au
eccentricity 0.890
inclination 22.2 deg
orbital period 1.433 y
perihelion distance 0.140 au
aphelion distance 2.402 au
MOID 0.0206 au
Tisserand parameter 4.510 (asteroidal)
absolute magnitude (H) 14.6
diameter 5.1 km
optical albedo 0.11
spectral class F, B
rotation period 3.603 h
lightcurve amplitude 0.11 - 0.44 mag
pole direction lambda = 85 deg, beta = -20 deg
PHA
Phaethon Close Earth Approaches Within 0.15 au:
Date (TDB) Body CA Dist MinDist MaxDist Vrel TCA3Sg Nsigs P_i/p
A.D. 1631 Dec 04.87057 Earth .129451 .129448 .129455 37.463 0.28 8.94E5 .000000
A.D. 1723 Dec 05.57449 Earth .145430 .145389 .145471 38.105 2.71 6.83E5 .000000
A.D. 1746 Dec 06.19456 Earth .128707 .128685 .128730 37.584 1.48 6.47E5 .000000
A.D. 1769 Dec 05.41186 Earth .142850 .142847 .142853 38.059 0.18 6.18E5 .000000
A.D. 1802 Dec 07.50563 Earth .128020 .127994 .128046 37.576 1.69 5.65E5 .000000
A.D. 1812 Dec 14.41557 Earth .075414 .075392 .075436 31.957 1.32 5.41E5 .000000
A.D. 1845 Dec 08.17934 Earth .111777 .111762 .111792 37.074 0.95 5.05E5 .000000
A.D. 1855 Dec 15.93005 Earth .086277 .086264 .086289 31.544 0.70 4.93E5 .000000
A.D. 1888 Dec 09.19404 Earth .088686 .088677 .088694 36.336 0.56 4.43E5 .000000
A.D. 1898 Dec 16.74220 Earth .107786 .107778 .107794 30.863 0.40 4.47E5 .000000
A.D. 1931 Dec 13.50144 Earth .038389 .038386 .038392 34.597 0.21 3.88E5 .000000
A.D. 1964 Dec 08.70985 Earth .131281 .131280 .131283 37.774 0.09 4.10E5 .000000
A.D. 1974 Dec 16.36240 Earth .054746 .054745 .054747 32.365 0.07 3.49E5 .000000
A.D. 2007 Dec 10.19673 Earth .120896 .120896 .120896 37.446 0.02 4.10E6 .000000
A.D. 2017 Dec 16.95810 Earth .068932 .068932 .068932 31.888 0.03 5.45E5 .000000
A.D. 2050 Dec 11.82259 Earth .082569 .082568 .082571 36.236 0.09 2.86E5 .000000
A.D. 2060 Dec 18.48085 Earth .111131 .111129 .111133 30.648 0.08 2.72E5 .000000
A.D. 2093 Dec 14.45306 Earth .019812 .019810 .019813 34.234 0.14 1.69E5 .000000 Wow...
A.D. 2136 Dec 13.92650 Earth .055065 .055062 .055068 35.401 0.20 6.11E5 .000000
A.D. 2146 Dec 19.83488 Earth .090252 .090248 .090255 31.170 0.16 98428. .000000
A.D. 2189 Dec 15.24219 Earth .035481 .035478 .035485 34.795 0.21 74794. .000000
A.D. 2199 Dec 20.58935 Earth .094898 .094896 .094899 31.016 0.06 2.44E5 .000000
A.D. 2242 Dec 14.61151 Earth .091625 .091613 .091636 36.502 0.68 62050. .000000
A.D. 2252 Dec 19.01935 Earth .033027 .033013 .033041 32.755 0.72 51202. .000000
A.D. 2295 Dec 15.68761 Earth .079921 .079893 .079949 36.095 1.62 1.19E5 .000000
A.D. 2305 Dec 22.37725 Earth .084068 .084034 .084103 31.292 1.67 1.56E5 .000000
A.D. 2348 Dec 18.51981 Earth .026363 .026291 .026435 34.388 4.49 2.31E5 .000000
A.D. 2358 Dec 23.35001 Earth .096338 .096314 .096363 30.968 1.17 2.57E5 .000000
A.D. 2401 Dec 15.20440 Earth .122133 .121893 .122374 37.327 14.55 3.24E5 .000000
A.D. 2411 Dec 20.98099 Earth .021385 .021209 .021565 33.333 18.19 3.47E5 .000000
A.D. 2454 Dec 15.03196 Earth .141051 .138488 .143615 37.905 157.41 4.26E5 .000000
A.D. 2464 Dec 20.49665 Earth .025300 .024373 .026604 33.392 174.52 4.52E5 .000000
Phaethon also makes repeated close encounters with Venus, Mercury, and 15 Eunomia.
Last update: 2017 Dec 14
Photo Credit: Leonid 2001, Hawaii, Courtesy NASA MEO.
The Geminid meteor shower will put on a dazzling show for skywatchers when it peaks overnight on Dec. 13-14.
Credits: NASA
Maybe you’ve already seen a bright meteor streak across the December sky? The annual Geminid meteor shower has arrived. It’s a good time to bundle up, go outside and let the universe blow your mind!
“With August’s Perseids obscured by bright moonlight, the Geminids will be the best shower this year,” said Bill Cooke with NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “The thin, waning crescent Moon won’t spoil the show.”
The shower will peak overnight Dec. 13-14 with rates around one per minute under good conditions, according to Cooke. Geminids can be seen on nights before and after the Dec. 14 peak, although they will appear less frequently.
“Geminid activity is broad,” said Cooke. “Good rates will be seen between 7:30 p.m. on Dec. 13 and dawn local time the morning of Dec. 14, with the most meteors visible from midnight to 4 a.m. on Dec. 14, when the radiant is highest in the sky.”
About the Geminid Shower
The Geminids are active every December, when Earth passes through a massive trail of dusty debris shed by a weird, rocky object named 3200 Phaethon. The dust and grit burn up when they run into Earth’s atmosphere in a flurry of “shooting stars.”
“Phaethon’s nature is debated,” said Cooke. “It’s either a near-Earth asteroid or an extinct comet, sometimes called a rock comet.”
As an added bonus this year, astronomers will have a chance to study Phaethon up close in mid-December, when it passes nearest to Earth since its discovery in 1983.
Meteor showers are named after the location of the radiant, usually a star or constellation close to where they appear in the night sky. The Geminid radiant is in the constellation Gemini.
The Geminids can be seen with the naked eye under clear, dark skies over most of the world, though the best view is from the Northern Hemisphere. Observers will see fewer Geminids in the Southern Hemisphere, where the radiant doesn’t climb very high over the horizon.
Observing the Geminids
Skywatching is easy. Just get away from bright lights and look up in any direction! Give your eyes time to adjust to the dark. Meteors appear all over the sky.
Not all the meteors you might see belong to the Geminid shower, however. Some might be sporadic background meteors, and some might be from weaker, active showers like the Monocerotids, Sigma Hydrids and the Comae Berenicids.
“When you see a meteor, try to trace it backwards,” said Cooke. “If you end up in the constellation Gemini there’s a good chance you’ve seen a Geminid.”
Learn More about the Geminids
Cooke and other meteor experts from NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office will be live on Facebook to discuss the Geminids and why meteors and meteoroids are important to NASA beginning at 8 p.m. EST on Dec. 12.
And if it’s cloudy where you are, NASA will broadcast the Geminid shower live via Ustream starting at sunset Dec. 13 from the Automated Lunar and Meteor Observatory at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
You can also see Geminid meteors on NASA’s All Sky Fireball network page. Follow NASA Meteor Watch on Facebook for information about meteor showers and fireballs throughout the year.
Molly Porter
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.
An artist concept depicting one of NASA’s twin Voyager spacecraft. Humanity’s farthest and longest-lived spacecraft are celebrating 40 years in August and September 2017.
The Voyager spacecraft were built by JPL, which continues to operate both. JPL is a division of Caltech in Pasadena. California. The Voyager missions are a part of the NASA Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. For more information about the Voyager spacecraft, visit https://www.nasa.gov/voyager and https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov.
If you tried to start a car that’s been sitting in a garage for decades, you might not expect the engine to respond. But a set of thrusters aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft successfully fired up Wednesday after 37 years without use.
Voyager 1, NASA’s farthest and fastest spacecraft, is the only human-made object in interstellar space, the environment between the stars. The spacecraft, which has been flying for 40 years, relies on small devices called thrusters to orient itself so it can communicate with Earth. These thrusters fire in tiny pulses, or “puffs,” lasting mere milliseconds, to subtly rotate the spacecraft so that its antenna points at our planet. Now, the Voyager team is able to use a set of four backup thrusters, dormant since 1980.
“With these thrusters that are still functional after 37 years without use, we will be able to extend the life of the Voyager 1 spacecraft by two to three years,” said Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
Since 2014, engineers have noticed that the thrusters Voyager 1 has been using to orient the spacecraft, called “attitude control thrusters,” have been degrading. Over time, the thrusters require more puffs to give off the same amount of energy. At 13 billion miles from Earth, there’s no mechanic shop nearby to get a tune-up.
The Voyager team assembled a group of propulsion experts at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, to study the problem. Chris Jones, Robert Shotwell, Carl Guernsey and Todd Barber analyzed options and predicted how the spacecraft would respond in different scenarios. They agreed on an unusual solution: Try giving the job of orientation to a set of thrusters that had been asleep for 37 years.
“The Voyager flight team dug up decades-old data and examined the software that was coded in an outdated assembler language, to make sure we could safely test the thrusters,” said Jones, chief engineer at JPL.
In the early days of the mission, Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter, Saturn, and important moons of each. To accurately fly by and point the spacecraft’s instruments at a smorgasbord of targets, engineers used “trajectory correction maneuver,” or TCM, thrusters that are identical in size and functionality to the attitude control thrusters, and are located on the back side of the spacecraft. But because Voyager 1’s last planetary encounter was Saturn, the Voyager team hadn’t needed to use the TCM thrusters since November 8, 1980. Back then, the TCM thrusters were used in a more continuous firing mode; they had never been used in the brief bursts necessary to orient the spacecraft.
All of Voyager’s thrusters were developed by Aerojet Rocketdyne. The same kind of thruster, called the MR-103, flew on other NASA spacecraft as well, such as Cassini and Dawn.
On Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2017, Voyager engineers fired up the four TCM thrusters for the first time in 37 years and tested their ability to orient the spacecraft using 10-millisecond pulses. The team waited eagerly as the test results traveled through space, taking 19 hours and 35 minutes to reach an antenna in Goldstone, California, that is part of NASA’s Deep Space Network.
Lo and behold, on Wednesday, Nov. 29, they learnedthe TCM thrusters worked perfectly — and just as well as the attitude control thrusters.
“The Voyager team got more excited each time with each milestone in the thruster test. The mood was one of relief, joy and incredulity after witnessing these well-rested thrusters pick up the baton as if no time had passed at all,” said Barber, a JPL propulsion engineer.
The plan going forward is to switch to the TCM thrusters in January. To make the change, Voyager has to turn on one heater per thruster, which requires power — a limited resource for the aging mission. When there is no longer enough power to operate the heaters, the team will switch back to the attitude control thrusters.
The thruster test went so well, the team will likely do a similar test on the TCM thrusters for Voyager 2, the twin spacecraft of Voyager 1. The attitude control thrusters currently used for Voyager 2 are not yet as degraded as Voyager 1’s, however.
Voyager 2 is also on course to enter interstellar space, likely within the next few years.
The Voyager spacecraft were built by JPL, which continues to operate both. JPL is a division of Caltech in Pasadena. The Voyager missions are a part of the NASA Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. For more information about the Voyager spacecraft, visit:
PHOTO: Selected in 1959, the Mercury astronauts, all military pilots, stand beside a Convair 106-B jet. From the left are: Lt. Scott Carpenter, U.S. Navy.; Capt. Gordon Cooper Jr., U.S. Air Force; Lt. Col. John Glenn Jr., U. S. Marine Corps; Capt. Virgil “Gus” Grissom, U.S. Air Force; Lt. Cdr. Walter Schirra Jr., U.S. Navy; Lt. Cdr. Alan Shepard, U.S. Navy; and Capt. Donald K. Slayton, U.S. Air Force. Credits: NASA
