Sheerit Yisrael—www.age-end.com

PO Box 473

Calder, Idaho 83808, USA

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

With a Different Approach to the Questions of

Religion, Philosophy, Faith, Hope and the Future

 

2009-11-Shevat-News

 

Jan 31, 2010 New Space Probe to the Sun will try to unravel Sun’s Threat to Earth

 

Times on Line had this by Chris Hastings and Jonathan Leake on “NASA mission to unravel sun’s threat to Earth, A new Probe could help scientists predict the solar storms that cause chaos for us.”  Per the story, scientists have designed a new probe to peer deep beneath the solar surface and observe how sunlight is generated.

Following its launch in early Feb 2010, the US space agency’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) will spend five years in orbit “trying to discover the causes of extreme solar activity, such as sun spots and solar winds and flares.  

“Scientists have long been aware that disturbances on the sun can trigger dangerous x-rays, charged particles and magnetic fields that can disrupt power supplies, communication signals and aircraft navigation systems on Earth.  By understanding how such solar phenomena are created, they hope to be able to produce reliable forecasts of “space weather” and provide advance warnings of any threat.”

The probe will orbit the Earth at a distance of 22,300 miles.  It will measure fluctuations in the sun’s ultraviolet output, map magnetic fields and photograph its surface and atmosphere.  Experts liken the mission to a “giant microscope” that will capture for the first time every nuance of the sun’s exterior. The images relayed to Earth will be 10 times clearer than high-definition television.

Barbara Thompson, project scientist, said: “It is Nasa’s first weather mission and it aims to characterise everything on the sun that can impact on the Earth and near Earth.  We know things happen on the sun which affect spacecraft, communications and radio signals. If we can understand the underlying causes of what is happening then we can turn this information into forecasts.  The key thing about the mission is that it is not just pure science for its own sake. There is likely to be a direct and immediate benefit for people.”

Solar magnetic storms and space weather disturbances have had a number of dramatic consequences over the years on earth.  On March 13, 1989, people in Canada and the United States were left without electricity for more than nine hours after a magnetic storm sent shockwaves through the Hydro-Québec power grid.  Some five years later, a geomagnetic storm temporarily knocked out two Canadian satellites and Intelsat-K, an international communications satellite.

The most powerful solar storm in history, known as a “superstorm”, occurred on September 1, 1859. It caused the failure of telegraph systems in Europe and North America.  The storm produced auroras — phenomena normally only seen near the poles — which were visible in Cuba, Mexico and Italy. The lights were so bright in California’s Rocky Mountains that gold prospectors mistook them for dawn and began preparing breakfast.

Nasa says that the SDO probe will transmit as much as 50 times more scientific data than any other mission in the space agency’s history.  Each image will consist of more than 16m pixels and the amount of data sent back to Earth daily will be equivalent to downloading 500,000 songs a day from the internet.

Professor Richard Harrison, of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, said understanding the impact of the sun’s magnetic fields was key to the mission.  He noted that “The idea is to image different layers of the sun’s atmosphere all the way down to the surface and measure magnetic fields… The bottom line is that you are trying to understand how this atmosphere works.  We can already see phenomena like the flares. The question is how does the magnetic field form to allow this sort of thing to happen.”

Comment:  Gen 11:6 reflects on the Tower of Babel incident when men under Nimrod thought to built a tower into the sky (maybe in the form of a pyramid).  YHWH was displeased.  He said that nothing would then restrain men from what they will plan on doing.  Since Gen 11:6 is prophetic, have we reached that day with our constant space flights and probes into the heavens?