Original post May 2010
I’ve always loved the sun since childhood. I’d settle all my dolls into their designated nap time places, although some of the dolls had fur and four legs, nevertheless it was high noon and their nap time and as for me, the time to lie down in the tall grass of my father’s land and once more wonder about the mysteries of the sun. No sooner would I have settled down I could feel the warmth of the sun caress my face in a gentle greeting and kisses kissed by angels, I knew very well those were the kisses of angels indeed because my freckles would turn a shade darker across my nose, and this of course was good enough proof for me.
I would hold up my hand against the sun squeezing my fingers tightly together and see the outlines of their bones, nature’s X-Ray machine. But the sun could do so much more. It could sprinkle sparkles across the lake, dancing on the waves like fairy elves beckoning to join them in a cooling splash or even send many different coloured rays on the edges of my mother’s large hallway mirror. I’d check and count the different colours of light with my right eye and then recheck with my left and count again the lights splitting into rainbow colours. My grandfather would at times worry then warn me, to stand in front of a mirror is vain, but I did not notice my own reflection, I saw the wonders of the sun.
Sunny Sunday mornings after church, my parents would take us kids for a bike ride on the country roads. While my mother would be on the lookout for pine cones along the forest floor, I’d watch the sun follow us through the trees and climb hills with us. Occasionally I’d get so absorbed by the sun’s light bouncing off and scattering in many directions of a granite rock along the way that I’d run my bike’s front wheel into my father’s rear wheel and send us both tumbling. He’d collect himself and sternly remind me to stay focused to which I’d reply; “I was. Just not in your direction.” He’d only nod and then smile to himself and I was sure the sun was smiling too.
Today, much older now, I see the sun with different eyes, the understanding of its physics, the workings of its beginning either to go out in a glory or fizzle quietly into an afterglow when its journey has reached its end. Just the same it captures all my senses even still to this day.
A neutron star, once a star eight times more massive than ours, collapses under its own gravity blasting out its outer skins in a super nova and now has become a compact spinning star in the night skies. Any planet with even the simplest single celled life form nearby would experience the energies of highs and lows by this spinning disco ball.
Or a star ten times or more massive than our sun blasts its final life outward into a super nova, then collapses in on itself but the neutron star continues to collapse where its massive weight creates a hole in space and time, known as a black hole and the mystery begins all over again. But super novas also leave a legacy behind when massive stars die. They create a stellar nursery, another solar system, another sun.
We love to observe the sun, whether we have very expensive telescopes or just a simple mirror to reflect the sun onto a sheet of paper and watch the sunspots, sunflares,solar eclipses and if you’re lucky that day even a coronal mass ejection. Since the beginning of pre-historic man and his awareness of this life giving globe in our skies, man always marvelled at this wonder that gives us warmth, makes trees, shrubberies and flowers come to life and from those very early observations many stories evolved, known today as myths.
Just for a change of pace here are some known myths among many.
Egyptian:
Ra (or Re) was known as the sun-god and the creator in ancient Egypt. He took on many forms, each depending on where he was. Usually Ra was portrayed with a hawk head, wearing a fiery disk like the Sun on his head. In the Underworld, the god took the form of a ram-head.
Ra was the creator of our world. In the beginning of time, an egg rose from the water. Once out of his shell, Ra had two children who became the atmosphere and clouds. They in turn had more children, Geb and Nut, who became the Earth and the stars. They in turn had two sons, Seth and Osiris, the father of Horus.
Picture: "Parnasus Apollo" by Raphael
In Greek mythology, Apollo was the son of Zeus (Jupiter) and Leto (Letona). He was the twin brother of the goddess Artemis. He was the god of the Sun, logic, and reason, and was also a fine musician and healer.
Leto travelled all over Greece to find a place to give birth to Apollo. She finally came upon an island named Delos. The island agreed to allow the birth of Apollo if he in turn founded a temple on the island. Leto agreed, and when Apollo grew up, he changed Delos into a beautiful island.
Sandro Botticelli: "Primavera" (1478). "Primavera" in Italian means "Spring." In this wonderfull painting by Botticelli, Mercury is depicted at far left. At the center is Venus, on Venus'left the three Graces, and on her right the goddess Flora. At the far right of the painting is the wind god Zephir pursuing the nymph Chloris. Zephir's breath cause the nymph to sprout flowers from her mouth.
Image courtesy of Planet Art.Artist's image of Lugh, the Sun god.
For the Celts, who lived in central Europe, Lugh was a Sun god. The underworld god Balor was his grandfather. Balor was the leader of the Fomorii. The Fomorii were evil people that lived in the underworld.
According to a prophecy, Balor was to be killed by a grandson. To prevent the happening of the prophecy, Balor tried to kill his grandson, but Lugh miraculously survived. Lugh was secretly raised by the god of the sea ,Manannan, and became an expert warrior.
When he reached manhood, he joined the peoples of the goddess Dana, named the Tuatha De Danaan, to help them in their struggle against the Fomorii and Balor. Balor had an evil eye capable of killing whomever looked at it. Lugh threw a magic stone ball into Balor's eye, and killed Balor.
Door to enclosure of Sun temple at Machu Picchu, Peru.
Inti was considered the Sun god and the ancestor of the Incas. Inca people were living in South America in the ancient Peru. In the remains of the city of Machu Picchu, it is possible to see a shadow clock which describes the course of the Sun personified by Inti.
Inti and his wife Pachamama, the Earth goddess, were regarded as benevolent deities. According to an ancient Inca myth, Inti taught his son Manco Capac and his daughter Mama Ocollo the arts of civilization and sent them to the Earth to instruct mankind about what they had learned.
Inti ordered his children to build the Inca capital where a divine golden wedge, they carried with them, would fall to the ground. Incas believed this happened in the city of Cuzco, which has been founded by the Ayar.
Surya Temple at Ranakpur, India.
Hinduism is the oldest Indian religion. Hinduism is based on some antique sacred writings and the assimilation of many different cultures and religious beliefs from other peoples. The oldest Hindu writing is the Rig Veda which is a collection of songs and hymns composed over 3,000 years ago. Many are the gods and goddesses described in the sacred Hindu writings.
In Hindu mythology, Surya represents the Sun god. Surya is depicted as a red man with three eyes and four arms, riding in a chariot drawn by seven mares. Surya holds water lilies with two of his hands. With his third hand he encourages his worshipers whom he blesses with his fourth hand. In India, Surya is believed to be a benevolent deity capable of healing sick people. Even today, people place the symbol of the Sun over shops because they think it would bring good fortune.
recognizing her. But Surya soon discovered Sanjna's refuge. He went to the same forest disguised as a horse. Sanjna gave birth to several children, and eventually reunited with her husband.
However, the heat and the light of Surya were so intolerable that Sanjna was always exhausted doing her domestic duties. Finally, Sanjna's father decided to help her and trimmed Surya's body reducing his brightness by an eighth. Thus, Sanjna could more easily live close to her husband.
When I took you back in time and how in my childhood I first started to get interested in the mysteries of our parent star, the sun, and why its mysteries is probably among my top favourites. Plus, more than that, the brain skills of the physicists and science technological engineers who put together these instruments like innards of an old vacuum cleaner and have them orbit the sun in complete synchronization, so we all can enjoy and learn about the sun.
Well, to my delight and hopefully so also yours, a couple of days after I had posted my last post (Here Comes The Sun), NASA’s Heliophysics Research Team provided me with some further insight of what our sun is up to lately as well as in the near future. Including some more solar instruments, SDO, SOHO, TRACE and STEREO again among the solar observing satellites and ACE probably the most heroic satellite of them all, you’ll learn about in this post.
It is not by mere chance that heliophysicists are gathering data of our sun’s activities, solar winds, solar flares, CME’s (coronal mass ejection) and solar storms; and animators bringing the collected data into visual video snippets so that people like myself can gather these clips and bring them together to form a visual story of our heliosphere and our sun’s activities within it.
There are two very important reasons why the solar physics team are taking a much closer look to understand the sun.
President Obama, although he nixed the moon project where our future astronauts’ mission is to walk on and explore Mars, rogue asteroids and other space missions, training on the moon, astronauts would have familiarized themselves with space activities, the president did however give the go ahead for space missions such as travelling to Mars, but not land on it, as well as to land on rogue asteroids. This brings a concern to solar physicists who know about the sun and what damage radiation can do. While President Obama did not give the funds for astronauts to land on Mars, NASA however is training future astronauts nevertheless how to land and explore on Mars.
When our astronauts first went to the moon in July 20, 1969, little was understood about our sun, nothing at all about solar flares, coronal mass ejection and much less about solar storms. In that time NASA thinking that aluminium foil is the best shield against “space weather”, our astronauts would be facing while on the moon, didn’t realize this was actually the worst material to use in keeping our astronauts safe from harm. Radiation, when hitting aluminium passes through the aluminium and splits, scattering many more radioactive particles in many directions. Luckily there was no solar activity in the time our boys went to the moon and now it is well understood that water is the key to absorb radiation and give our astronauts, particularly on the International Space Station a “safe room” whenever alerted a solar flare has erupted.
(excerpt from NASA) During the Apollo program, there were several near-misses between the astronauts walking on the surface of the Moon and a deadly solar storm event. The Apollo 12 astronauts walked on the Moon only a few short weeks after a major solar proton flare would have bathed the astronauts in a 100 rem blast of radiation. Another major flare that occurred half way between the Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 moonwalks would have had a much more deadly outcome had it arrived while astronauts were outside their spacecraft playing golf. Within a few minutes, the astronauts would have been killed on the spot with an incredible 7000 rem blast of radiation. The daily dosage of radiation on the Space Station is about equal to 8 chest X-rays per day.
For now what engineering physicists have come up with to keep our boys and girls safe from harm is a water encased “safe room” on board the Ares l spacecraft that will take our astronauts to rogue asteroids and Mars. (It works in the same principal as an insulated room excepting it is insulated with water.) What they are thriving for is to build a magnetosphere for the entire spacecraft which then would not only have protection for our astronauts but also for the instruments on board.
This is the second reason why the solar physics team lead at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, want to make sure our technology right here on earth is protected from these solar storms. As electronic technologies have become more sophisticated and more embedded into everyday life, they have also become more vulnerable to solar activity. On Earth, power lines and long-distance telephone cables might be affected by auroral currents. Radar, cell phone communications, and GPS receivers could be disrupted by solar radio noise. Experts who have studied the question say there is little to be done to protect satellites from a Carrington-class flare. In fact, a recent paper estimates potential damage to the 900-plus satellites currently in orbit could cost between $30 billion and $70 billion. What Carrington saw was a white-light solar flare—a magnetic explosion on the sun. The explosion produced not only a surge of visible light but also a mammoth cloud of charged particles and detached magnetic loops—a "CME"—and hurled that cloud directly toward Earth. The next morning when the CME arrived, it crashed into Earth's magnetic field, causing the global bubble of magnetism that surrounds our planet to shake and quiver. Researchers call this a "geomagnetic storm." These kinds of solar storms have their own magnetic field and our earth’s magnetosphere is virtually powerless against that.
It happened again in December 2005, X-rays from another solar storm disrupted satellite-to-ground communications and Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation signals for about 10 minutes. The Carrington event is the biggest. It's possible to delve back even farther in time by examining arctic ice. Energetic particles leave a record in nitrates in ice cores, here again the Carrington event sticks out as the biggest in the past 500 years.
No wonder NASA and other space agencies around the world have made the study and prediction of flares a priority.
Right now a fleet of spacecraft is monitoring the sun, gathering data on flares big and small that may eventually reveal what triggers the explosions.
TRACE is probably among my favourite satellites because it takes images in amazingly clear X-Ray. I remember when my father took time off his busy schedule when I was a child to take me to a parade, perhaps it was a Santa Clause parade I’m really not sure. I also never did see much of the parade, to my father’s dismay. It all turned to be a viewing of the sun instead when my father inadvertently bought some large chocolate figure wrapped in deep red see through wrapping paper. I unwrapped the chocolate, smoothed out the cellophane and then held it to my eyes. It was the first time I saw the sun “red with anger” and every time I see images taken by TRACE in that deep angry red, it reminds me of that day and the parade. Sometimes I still wonder what the parade was about.
Research won't prevent another Carrington flare, but it may make the "flurry of surprise" a thing of the past.
The solar satellites:
TRACE, (Transition Region and Coronal Explorer) was launched 02-Apr-1998- a three-axis stabilized spacecraft, uses an instrument provided guide telescope as the fine Sun sensor. The spacecraft must null the peak error to the guide telescope to within 20 arcseconds. The TRACE telescope has an image motion compensation mechanism which can attenuate jitter to about 0.1 arcseconds resolution. The Attitude Control System (ACS) uses three magnetic-torquer coils, one digital Sun sensor, six coarse Sun sensors, four reaction wheels, one three-axis magnetometer, and three two-axis inertial gyros. The ACS uses the spacecraft computer to perform closed loop attitude determination and control. (ESA/NASA)
ACE, (Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment) is a satellite mission on board the Canadian satellite SCISAT-1, that takes measurements of the Earth's atmosphere.
The measurements consist of spectra and images that are used to investigate chemical and dynamical processes in our atmosphere, with a particular emphasis on ozone depletion in the Arctic stratosphere.
Dr. Peter Bernath from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Waterloo is the head scientist of the mission, which involves the collaboration of members from several universities, industries and other organizations in Canada, NASA/ESA.
SOHO, the (Solar & Heliospheric Observatory), is a project of international collaboration between ESA and NASA to study the Sun from its deep core to the outer corona and the solar wind.
SOHO was launched on December 2, 1995. The SOHO spacecraft was built in Europe by an industry team led by prime contractor Matra Marconi Space (now EADS Astrium) under overall management by ESA. The twelve instruments on board SOHO were provided by European and American scientists. Nine of the international instrument consortia are led by European Principal Investigators (PI's), three by PI's from the US. Large engineering teams and more than 200 co-investigators from many institutions supported the PI's in the development of the instruments and in the preparation of their operations and data analysis. NASA was responsible for the launch and is now responsible for mission operations. Large radio dishes around the world which form NASA's Deep Space Network are used for data downlink and commanding. Mission control is based at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
STEREO (Solar TEerrestrial RElations Observatory) is the third mission in NASA's Solar Terrestrial Probes program (STP). Launched October 2006, will provide a unique and revolutionary view of the Sun-Earth System. The two nearly identical observatories - one ahead of Earth in its orbit, the other trailing behind - will trace the flow of energy and matter from the Sun to Earth. They will reveal the 3D structure of coronal mass ejections; violent eruptions of matter from the sun that can disrupt satellites and power grids, and help us understand why they happen. STEREO will become a key addition to the fleet of space weather detection satellites by providing more accurate alerts for the arrival time of Earth-directed solar ejections with its unique side-viewing perspective.
The two STEREO launched October 2006 observatories are nearly identical with selective redundancy. The building of the spacecraft bus and the integration of the instruments were done by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL).
The two solar-powered observatories with 3-axis-stabilization, each had a mass at launch of approximately 1,364 pounds (620 kilograms, including propellant). The spacecraft communicate with the APL-based Mission Operations Center via NASA’s Deep Space Network.
SDO (Solar Dynamics Observatory) contains a suite of instruments that provide observations that will lead to a more complete understanding of the solar dynamics that drive variability in the Earth's environment. This set of instruments does the following:
1.Measure the extreme ultraviolet spectral irradiance of the Sun at a rapid cadence
2.Measure the Doppler shifts due to oscillation velocities over the entire visible disk
3.Make high-resolution measurements of the longitudinal and vector magnetic field over the entire visible disk
4.Make images of the chromosphere and inner corona at several temperatures at a rapid cadence
5.Make those measurements over a significant portion of a solar cycle to capture the solar variations that may exist in different time periods of a solar cycle
The Science Teams receive the data from SDO. They then process, analyze, archive, and serve the data.
NASA/HMI (Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager)Stanford University. AIA (Atmospheric Imaging Assembly)Lockheed Martin Solar Astrophysics Laboratory. EVE (Extreme Ultraviolet Variablity Experiment)University of Colorado.
The two STEREO observatories launched October 2006 are nearly identical with selective redundancy. The building of the spacecraft bus and the integration of the instruments were done by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL).
The two solar-powered observatories with 3-axis-stabilization, each had a mass at launch of approximately 1,364 pounds (620 kilograms, including propellant). The spacecraft communicate with the APL-based Mission Operations Center via NASA’s Deep Space Network.
SOHO, the Solar & Heliospheric Observatory, is a project of international collaboration between ESA and NASA to study the Sun from its deep core to the outer corona and the solar wind.
SOHO was launched on December 2, 1995. The SOHO spacecraft was built in Europe by an industry team led by prime contractor Matra Marconi Space (now EADS Astrium) under overall management by ESA. The twelve instruments on board SOHO were provided by European and American scientists. Nine of the international instrument consortia are led by European Principal Investigators (PI's), three by PI's from the US. Large engineering teams and more than 200 co-investigators from many institutions supported the PI's in the development of the instruments and in the preparation of their operations and data analysis.
NASA was responsible for the launch and is now responsible for mission operations. Large radio dishes around the world which form NASA's Deep Space Network are used for data downlink and commanding. Mission control is based at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
TRACE, wass launched 02-Apr-1998- a three-axis stabilized spacecraft, uses an instrument provided guide telescope as the fine Sun sensor. The spacecraft must null the peak error to the guide telescope to within 20 arcseconds. The TRACE telescope has an image motion compensation mechanism which can attenuate jitter to about 0.1 arcseconds resolution. The Attitude Control System (ACS) uses three magnetic-torquer coils, one digital Sun sensor, six coarse Sun sensors, four reaction wheels, one three-axis magnetometer, and three two-axis inertial gyros. The ACS uses the spacecraft computer to perform closed loop attitude determination and control. (ESA/NASA)
Wish you all a very good week and a safe weekend ahead
Wabbit
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