Today NASA released a first ever video of a December 2008 coronal mass ejejction engulfing planet earth, recreated from composites of two satellites called Stereo A and B, which were in perfect position to record this remarkable event.
IBT reports NASA Releases Video of Solar Storm Engulfing Planet [VIDEOS]
A spacecraft far from Earth turned and watched a solar storm engulfed the planet for the first time, and NASA released a movie on the act, which solar physicists say could lead to important advances in space weather forecasting.
"The movie sent chills down my spine," said Craig DeForest of the Southwest Researcher Institute in Boulder, Colo. in a statement. "It shows a CME swelling into an enormous wall of plasma and then washing over the tiny blue speck of Earth where we live. I felt very small."
According to NASA, CMEs are billion-ton clouds of solar plasma launched by the same explosions that spark solar flares. And, whenever they sweep past our planet, they can cause auroras, radiation storms, and in extreme cases power outages.
The movies pinpoint both the arrival time of the CME and its mass, and from the brightness of the cloud, researchers can precisely calculate the gas density.
The space agency added that when CMEs first leave the sun, they are bright and easy to see. But that visibility is quickly reduced as the clouds expand into the void. Then, by the time a typical CME crosses the orbit of Venus, it is a billion times fainter than the surface of the full Moon, and more than a thousand times fainter than the Milky Way, NASA said, adding that CMEs that reach Earth are almost as gossamer as vacuum itself and correspondingly transparent.
The footage released today was recorded by the satellites in December of 2008, and it has taken NASA image processing experts, three years to figure out how to separate the faint images these solar clouds make out of the background starlight, and ambient dust.
But, now that we know how to do it, NASA scientist will be able to apply these tehniques much more quickly, to predict the path of storms.
We've had several excellent articles about the recent huge solar flare and CME, that was eject away from earth, that I'd like to extend comment on, but I will have to do it tomorrow. One issue I have new research to report is on why the National Academy of Science analysis suggests an extremely large flare could leave as many as 135 million people "off the electric grids" for years or longer. It has to do with the lack of abiltiy to replace the over 300 large scale transformers that could be "fried" from the induced electro-magnetic pulse.
But, I'll have to explore this tomorrow. This article just came out as I was going to bed.
Hope you enjoy this remarkable video, in the meantime.
Thu Aug 18, 2011 at 10:08 PM PT: Here's a 11 second animation to give you an overview of how this 2008 CME generated solar storm expanded towards earth, from a more distant angel.