The annual Perseid meteor shower began on July 17th and will continue through August 26th, but the peak viewing times will be the pre-dawn hours of August 11, 12 and 13 (Wednesday-Friday) in what promises to be a good show. This year’s peak viewing will come at a time when the moon will be just 13% illuminated and it’ll set well before the peak viewing time period begins (i.e., late night/pre-dawn hours). Of course, all success for viewing will depend on the sky conditions during those particular nights. The Perseid meteor shower comes every August as the Earth passes through a cloud of dust that comes from Comet Swift-Tuttle as it approaches the sun.
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It was this same time of year and during the height of the Cold War when a powerful solar storm could have led to a disastrous military conflict between the US and Soviet Union if not for the early efforts of the US Air Force to monitor solar activity. On May 23rd, 1967, a solar storm took place that was so powerful, it jammed radar and radio communications in polar regions and the US Air Force actually began to prepare aircraft for war thinking the nation’s surveillance radars were being jammed by the Soviet Union. Fortunately, space weather forecasters in the military suspected there might be another cause and they relayed information about the possibility that a solar storm could have been the reason for the disrupted radar and radio communications. As it turned out, this information was enough to keep the planes on the ground and the US avoided a potential nuclear weapon exchange with the Soviet Union.
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The most intense geomagnetic storm of the 20th Century took place one hundred years ago during solar cycle 15 in a 3-day period from May 13-15 in 1921. The storm occurred before the widespread electrical dependence of infrastructure that we have in today’s world, but the impact from an extraordinarily powerful coronal mass ejection was still quite extensive. The storm’s electrical current sparked a number of fires around the world including one near the Grand Central Terminal in New York City. In addition, auroras appeared throughout the eastern US creating brightly lit nighttime skies and telegraph service virtually stopped in its tracks due to blown fuses and damaged equipment. Research in recent years has suggested that this super solar storm of May 1921 was equally as intense as the granddaddy of all super storms in recorded history – the “Carrington Event of 1859”.
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After two postponements over the past two days, a rocket launch is now scheduled for Monday evening at the NASA/Wallops facility in Virginia and it could be visible in much of the eastern US. The mission is scheduled for no earlier than 8:04 PM on May 10th with a 40 minute launch window and it is designed to study space plasmas after the release of barium vapor.
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Earlier today, NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter became the first aircraft to make a controlled flight on another planet. The solar-powered helicopter became airborne at 3:34 AM (ET) which was at a local time on Mars that was determined to likely feature optimal energy and flight conditions. Data indicates Ingenuity climbed to its prescribed altitude of 10 feet and maintained a stable hover for 30 seconds. It then descended and touched back down on the surface of Mars after logging a total of 39.1 seconds of flight. This was an important test for the helicopter which was full of unknowns as Mars has an extremely thin atmosphere and significantly lower gravity than Earth.
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NASA’s fifth Mars rover, Perseverance, successfully landed on the red planet last Thursday, February 18th and it will remain there for nearly two years searching for ancient life and exploring the surface. There have already been several newly released images by NASA and you can actually listen to a ~10 mph wind on the red planet (see below). Perseverance is the most technologically advanced robot NASA has sent so far having traveled 293 million miles to reach the planet over the course of more than six months. One of the highlights of the mission will be the deployment of a 19 inch tall helicopter named “Ingenuity” which will become the first rotorcraft ever used beyond Earth.
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If you step outside tonight shortly after sunset and look to the southwest sky you should see Jupiter and Saturn quite close together. The two giant gas planets have actually been converging in recent weeks in terms of their appearance to us here on Earth and they will appear closest together on Monday, December 21st - the day of the winter solstice and the day of what is being called the “Great Conjunction”. In fact, it has been many, many centuries since the two giant gas planets have appeared so close together and have been so easy to see.
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You may have already noticed two close together bright objects in the sunset sky in recent weeks which happen to be the giant gas planets of Jupiter and Saturn. These two planets are actually converging for an even closer encounter in terms of their appearance to us here on Earth - the likes of which haven’t been seen in many, many centuries. Jupiter and Saturn currently appear about 2 degrees apart and they will actually look only 0.1 degrees apart by the time we get to the winter solstice on December 21st - the day of the “Great Conjunction” of 2020.
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After a deep solar minimum, the number of sunspots on our nearest star has been on the increase in recent weeks heralding the new solar cycle #25. The last solar cycle, #24, was one of the weakest in terms of the number of sunspots in more than a century since solar cycle #14 peaked in February 1906 and it continued a downward trend in cycle strength since around 1980 when cycle #21 reached a peak. Many predictions of solar cycle #25 have it just about as weak as its predecessor with a peak likely to arrive sometime in the middle of 2025. Even weak solar cycles, however, can produce significant solar storms and it’s something we’ll monitor closely in coming months.
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Just 100 miles up the coast from where the Wright brothers first flew their airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Northrop Grumman is scheduled to launch its Cygnus cargo spacecraft aboard the Antares rocket from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS), located at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The rocket launch is scheduled for 9:38 PM Thursday, October 1st at NASA’s Wallops Island Facility and it may be visible throughout the Mid-Atlantic region (launch was originally scheduled for Tuesday, but was scrubbed due to rainy weather conditions).
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