The images I used to make this animation are courtesy of NASA

There’s no doubt global warming is happening but is it natural or "man-made". One thing’s for sure: I’m not going to wait and see what happens. Prevention is the cure.

This data has been recorded by the Aqua satellite with the AMSR-E module. More information along with a neat January 1, 2007 – September 14th time lapse movie of the same region can be found on NASA’s website.

HOUSTON — NASA astronaut Sunita Williams set a new spaceflight record early Saturday as she and her Atlantis shuttle crewmates continue their mission to the International Space Station (ISS).

At precisely 1:47 a.m. EDT (0547 GMT), Williams took the all-time title for the longest spaceflight by a female astronaut as she passed the 188-day, four-hour mark in Earth orbit.

“This has been my home. I love living up here,” Williams told CBS News earlier this week, adding that the station is great place to work, even if unfinished. “Hopefully, over the past six months, a lot of people have joined me and been able to see that.”

Williams’ spaceflight surpassed that of fellow NASA astronaut Shannon Lucid, who spent just over 188 days in orbit during a 1996 mission to Russia’s Mir Space Station. By coincidence, Williams set the new record on the 44th anniversary of the launch of the first female spaceflyer Valentina Tereshkova, a cosmonaut launched by the former Soviet Union in 1963.

Williams has lived aboard the ISS since December 2006, when she launched spaceward aboard NASA’s shuttle Discovery to join the orbital laboratory’s Expedition 14 crew. She stayed on in April as part of the station’s Expedition 15 crew.

During that time, Williams – a Massachusetts native and diehard Boston Red Sox fan – has performed four spacewalks and run the Boston Marathon from orbit. She is returning to Earth with Atlantis’ STS-117 crew after turning her ISS duties over to NASA astronaut Clayton Anderson.

That ISS crew handover is among the many tasks on the docket for the STS-117 crew today, mission managers said. Expedition 15 cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov will likely have a lighter workload aboard the ISS, since they have spent the last few days working long hours with Russian flight controllers on Earth to recover vital computer systems inside the station’s Russian-built Zvezda module, NASA said.

Spacewalk ahead

NASA ISS flight director Kelly Beck told SPACE.com Friday that the Atlantis and Expedition 15 crews will spend some of their time transferring items between their two spacecraft as Anderson and Williams swap roles aboard the two vehicles. But the main focus, she added, will be on plans for Sunday.

“Primarily, the crew is going to be preparing themselves for the fourth EVA,” Beck said of the final extravehicular activity (EVA) planned for the STS-117 mission during a briefing.

Atlantis astronauts Patrick Forrester and Steven Swanson will perform the spacewalk Sunday to complete some work on the space station’s new Starboard 3/Starboard 4 truss segments left over from the last three EVAs, as well as a few tasks currently slated for future spacewalkers, Beck said.

The 10 shuttle and ISS astronauts are also due to speak with reporters during a space-to-ground news conference at about 7:43 p.m. EDT (2343 GMT).

Commanded by veteran spaceflyer Rick Sturckow, the Atlantis crew is flying a 13-day mission to deliver Anderson and new starboard solar arrays and trusses to the ISS.

Anderson launched aboard Atlantis as a mission specialist and has since transitioned to take his post as an Expedition 15 flight engineer and NASA’s ISS science officer.

Williams, meanwhile, is now serving as an STS-117 mission specialist for the return trip to Earth. Their crew swap, originally slated to occur on NASA’s STS-118 mission in August, was moved up one flight due to launch delays for Atlantis’ current flight.

Using a robotic telescope at the European Space Organization’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, called the Rapid Eye Mount (REM) telescope, astronomers have measured once-theoretical speeds of the explosions known as gamma-ray bursts for the first time.

"This is very exciting," said Stan Woosley, an University of California astronomer and astrophysicist who was not involved in the research. Woosley said the energy found in the bursts "strain the models" dictating how fast matter can go.

The findings are detailed in the latest issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Rapid observations

The bursts last only seconds to several minutes and their intense energy is at very short wavelengths we can’t see, so timing and an automated recording method is critical in order to catch one.

An illustration of the initial explosion in the death of a massive star.

Emilio Molinari, an astronomer with the Brera Astronomical Observatory in Italy and co-author of the study, said the observation was possible thanks to quick, automated observations of major galactic catastrophes.

"We can now study in great detail the very first moments following these cosmic catastrophes," Molinari said.

In two separate events, on April 18 and June 7 of last year, NASA’s Swift satellite detected a bright gamma-ray burst and automatically notified the small REM telescope. Just 40 seconds after each explosion, the robotic observer swung around and aimed its lens at the event. Although the initial explosions were invisible at first, the intense energy heated up nearby gas which could be seen in near-infrared light by the telescope.

Warp speed

By studying the changing brightness of both bursts, the astronomers measured how fast matter was careening away from the bursts. Astrophysicists use a special system to peg the speed of matter, called the Lorentz factor–the higher the number, the closer to the speed of light.

In the case of both bursts, the Lorentz factor was 400–an unprecedented observation until now.

Stefano Covino, another co-author of the study and astronomer at the Brera Astronomical Observatory, said the speed wasn’t the only impressing figure.

"While single particles … can be accelerated to still larger velocities, the present cases are the equivalent of about 200 times the mass of the Earth acquiring this incredible speed," Covino said.

"You certainly wouldn’t like to be in the way," said Susanna Vergani, another team member.

Now that the team has made the striking observations, they are trying to find some way to explain them. "The next question is which kind of ‘engine’ can accelerate matter to such enormous speeds," Covino said.

MIAMI (AP) – An aging U.S. weather satellite crucial to accurate predictions on the intensity and path of hurricanes could fail at any moment and plans to launch a replacement have been pushed back seven years to 2016.

In a letter obtained by The Associated Press, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s chief said the failure of the QuikScat satellite could bring more uncertainty to forecasts and widen the areas that are placed under hurricane watches and warnings.

If the satellite faltered, experts estimate that the accuracy of two-day forecasts would suffer by 10 percent and three-day forecasts by 16 percent, which could translate into miles of coastline and the difference between a city being evacuated or not. The satellite covers about 90 percent of the globe’s oceans, experts say. 

"We would go blind. It would be significantly hazardous," said Wayne Sallade, emergency manager in Florida’s Charlotte County, which was hit hard by Hurricane Charley in 2004.

In the letter to a Florida congressman, NOAA Administrator Conrad Lautenbacher blamed the delays on technical and budget problems. Scientists said if QuikScat failed, they may have to rely on less accurate satellites.

Bill Proenza, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, said authorities "may have to err on the side of caution" in future forecasts.

That means "more people disrupted, and more impact on the economy," Proenza said. "On the other hand, we have to err on the side of the protection of life. And that’s how we would handle it."

Lautenbacher said the replacement is part of a larger program to update America’s weather satellites. The AP reported last week that other cuts in the program have included scaled-back efforts to measure global warming from space.

Last year, forecasts were off an average of 111 miles (179 kilometers) two days in advance, a figure that has been cut in half over the past 15 years. But experts said that could grow 10 percent to 122 miles (196 kilometers) if the satellite is lost, causing the "cone of error" well known to coastal residents to expand.

Some scientists also complain that the technology planned for the replacement satellite is less precise for hurricane forecasting than what is currently flying.

QuikScat, launched in 1999 and designed to last two to three years, provides key data on wind speed and direction over the ocean. Weather aircraft and buoys can also obtain similar measurements near a storm, but they do not provide a constant flow of data as QuikScat does.

Last year, the satellite suffered a major setback – the failure of a transmitter used to send data to Earth about every 90 minutes. Now the satellite is limping along on a backup transmitter and has other problems.

The backup transmitter could last years, but there are no guarantees and no warnings when it is about to fail, said Robert Gaston, who works with the satellite at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Even if money were immediately available, a replacement satellite is estimated to take at least four years and cost approximately $400 million (euro300 million) to build. The AP first reported those estimates in a March interview with Proenza, one of the loudest voices calling for a replacement satellite.

"When you look at QuikScat what it does is it gives us a swath of data that’s 1,500 to 1,800 kilometers wide, all at one time, one moment. It covers 90 percent of the global oceans in one day," he said recently.

If the satellite fails, the options are few. Other satellites have instruments to measure wind speed and direction over water, but they are less accurate.

A European satellite called ASCAT is available, but it does not give scientists as clear a picture as QuikScat because the distance between the readings it takes is larger. Using ASCAT would be like a person who wears glasses taking them off, seeing a once-sharp world blurred, said National Hurricane Center senior hurricane specialist Rick Knabb.

A NASA and Department of Defense satellite called WINDSAT also measures wind speed and direction, but it too is beyond its expected lifespan, and scientists have had trouble using it to observe tropical weather systems.

That is a problem because NOAA intended QuikScat’s replacement to be modeled on WINDSAT.

A replacement for QuikScat was originally scheduled to launch in 2009. Lautenbacher would not give a date for that flight in the letter, but other officials have said it is scheduled to launch in 2016.

The satellite’s final form is still undetermined, but Knabb said the design does not currently feature technology comparable to QuikScat. He said the satellite’s data will not be particularly helpful for hurricanes.

"When we need the data the most is when it’s not going to perform very well – inside a tropical cyclone," Knabb said.

Take the announcement last week of a massive planet, dubbed TrES-3, that zips around its star in an amazingly rapid 31 hours, giving the planet a 1.3-day year. Astronomers issued a press release, but you might not have heard about it because the discovery was so overshadowed by other planet announcements and barely received news coverage.

“It’s pretty routine now,” said Alan Boss, a planet formation theorist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. “Most planets that are found are not deemed worthy of a press release because they are sort of becoming ‘one more planet.’”

The total is now more than 200 extrasolar planets confirmed. And this is the tip of the iceberg in planet finds. Astronomers have more tools than ever, and technology is so advanced that planet discovery has become almost mundane.

The regularity of planet finds, luckily, is buffered by the wild variety in the discoveries themselves, including the following contrasts: nascent worlds of just a million years versus those that are billions of years old; hot gas giants and icy Neptune-like orbs; planets that whip around their parent stars with cosmic speed and others that seem to creep at a slug’s pace; and planets orbiting double-stars, red-dwarf stars and even so-called failed stars. 

Transit technique

Astronomers spotted TrES-3 as part of the Trans-atlantic Exoplanet Survey while looking for transiting planets, or those that pass directly in front of their home star with respect to Earth. It was detected with a network of telescopes in Arizona, California, and the Canary Islands. When TrES-3 coasted in front of its home star, the telescopes picked up a slight dimming of the star’s light, by about 2.5 percent. The scientists used the dimming to estimate the planet’s mass, size and other properties.

It is located 800 light-years away in the constellation Hercules about 10 degrees west of Vega, one of the brightest stars in the summer skies of the northern hemisphere.

“It is also a very massive planet-about twice the mass of the solar system’s biggest planet, Jupiter-and is one of the planets with the shortest known periods,” said a co-discoverer of TrES-3 Georgi Mandushev of the Lowell Observatory in Arizona.

The giant orb orbits so close to its parent star, about 50 times closer than Earth is to the Sun, the astronomers estimate its temperature soars to about 1,500 degrees Kelvin.

Stellar wobbles

While the “transit method” provides astronomers with the best indirect information about an exoplanet, so far only about 20 transiting planets have been spotted.

That’s why the most successful (based on the number of planet finds) teams have relied on the so-called wobble method, or radio-velocity technique.

“The radial-velocity teams are the most successful,” Boss told SPACE.com. “They are a victim of their own success. They are able to get more and more telescope time, because they can prove to the assignment committees that give out the time that ‘if you give us so many more nights we can probably find you so many more planets,’” Boss said.

He added, “The key bottleneck for finding more planets is simply more time on a telescope.”

The firsts and superlatives

In addition to finding new worlds, the burgeoning field has achieved many firsts.

In 2001, a team led by David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics used the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s infrared-detecting Spitzer Space Telescope to detect for the first time the atmosphere of an extrasolar hot Jupiter called HD 189733b.

Another hot Jupiter, Upsilon Andromeda b, revealed for the first time an exoplanet with a temperature variation across its surface: One side has temperatures rivaling those found deep in a volcano while the other face could plunge below freezing.

Superlatives abound as well, with discoveries gaining fame as the windiest, tiniest, most massive and fastest orbiter.

• Shortest orbital period in catalog: HD 41004 B b completes a full orbit in 1.328 days.

• Longest orbit: HD 154345 b takes 13,100 days to orbit its parent star.

• Lightest planet: Gliese 581 C weighs just five Earth masses.

Planet organizer

In an effort to keep track of the rapidly increasing list of exoplanets, a group of astronomers published a catalog of nearby exoplanets within 652 light-years of Earth in a 2006 issue of the Astrophysical Journal, though they realize updates will be a must on a routine basis.

“Without question, the catalog presented here will become out of date before it is printed,” the researchers say in the published report of the catalog.

But with such a huge sample of relatively nearby planets, theorists now have the chance to test out their theories in the “real world.”

“This whole business of extrasolar planets has been a real boon for theorists because so far they had only one planetary system to study-and that was ours,” Mandushev said in a telephone interview.

For instance, when does an object stop being a planet and become a star, a threshold that theory places at 10 to 15 Jupiter masses and beyond which an object can ignite hydrogen fusion to power a stellar glow’

The real goal

The ultimate goal, say many planet hunters, is to find Earth-like planets, or those with similar masses, orbits and rocky compositions to Earth. And beyond finding the physical Earth-like attributes would be to find life. So far no “Earths” have been identified, though observatories are coming online with the sensitivity to detect small objects that orbit far from their host stars, as our planet does.

“The hunt is still on for rocky, Earth-like planets,” said Jason Wright, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, who was part of the team compiling the exoplanet catalog.

And astronomers have identified the first Earth-like planet that could support liquid water and harbor life. The “super Earth,” Gliese 581 C, weighs about five Earth masses and is either a rocky planet or one covered entirely by oceans, astronomers speculate.

Multi-planet systems are also a goal. So far about 25 multi-planet systems have been identified with two such systems supporting four planets.

“We haven’t found a clone of the solar system yet,” Boss said. “But that’s only ruling out maybe 10 percent of the stars. The other 90 percent could have exact solar system analogs and we wouldn’t know it because we haven’t been able to take data for long enough to actually find their planetary systems.”

Source: www.space.com

• Top 10 Most Intriguing Extrasolar Planets

  Source: www.space.com

  HOUSTON – NASA’s space shuttle Atlantis berthed with the International Space Station (ISS) Sunday afternoon, ending a two-day chase to deliver new solar arrays to the orbital laboratory.

The high-flying linkup linkup occurred on time at 3:36 p.m. EDT (1936 GMT), as the shuttle docked with the space station’s Destiny laboratory module.

"We’re looking forward to a great day and seeing our friends on the station," STS-117 mission specialist Clayton Anderson said before docking.

About one hour before docking, as Atlantis hovered about 600 feet (182 meters) below the station, STS-117 commander Rick Sturckow flipped the shuttle nose-over-tail in a nine-minute Rendezvous Pitch Maneuver, or RPM, to allow ISS Expedition 15 commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and flight engineer Oleg Kotov to take high-resolution images of heat shields on the shuttle’s underbelly. Those images will be beamed down to mission control later today to look for signs of damage incurred during ascent.

Hatch opening is slated for 4:58 pm EDT (2158 GMT), followed by a brief welcome ceremony. Atlantis and its seven-astronaut crew launched towards the ISS late Friday in a near-flawless liftoff from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Busy night ahead

Before the shuttle and station astronauts sleep tonight, they will use Atlantis’ robotic arm to haul the 17.5-ton Starboard 3/Starboard 4 (S3/S4) truss segment and solar arrays from the shuttle’s cargo bay and hand it off to the space station’s arm, where it will await installation on Monday on the first of three planned spacewalks.

The $367.3 million truss segments and solar arrays will be installed to the starboard side of the station’s main truss, which serves as a sort of metallic backbone for the orbital laboratory. Combined with a pair of portside solar wings already attached the station, the new arrays will lay the power foundation to support the addition of new modules and international laboratories to the ISS.

Anderson is also scheduled to relieve astronaut Sunita Williams, who has been aboard the station as Expedition 15 flight engineer since December.

On June 16, Williams will break a world record set by astronaut Shannon Lucid in 1996 for the most time spent by a woman in space during a single spaceflight.

"Records are made to be broken, so we look forward to the next one," said shuttle program manager Wayne Hale. "I’m sure we that will have greater endurance records in the future, and going greater distances and exploring new planets, and I’m sure that women will be a part of the team."

NASA is broadcasting the space shuttle Atlantis’ STS-117 mission live on NASA TV. Mission updates from SPACE.com’s video feed.