NASA Launches Its Third Global 'Codeathon' with New Coastal Flooding Challenge

March 19, 2014

RELEASE 14-075

NASA Launches Its Third Global 'Codeathon' with New Coastal Flooding Challenge

NASA Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan spoke Wednesday at the White House Climate Data Initiative launch, during which she announced the third International Space Apps Challenge.

Image Credit: 

NASA/Aubrey Gemignani

NASA along with space agencies around the world are preparing for the third annual International Space Apps Challenge, which will be held April 12-13. Participants will develop mobile applications, software, hardware, data visualization and platform solutions that could contribute to space exploration missions and help improve life on Earth.

At the Climate Data Initiative launch at the White House Wednesday, NASA Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan announced the inclusion of a new challenge focused on coastal flooding, developed by NASA and NOAA, and based on federal cross-agency data. The Coastal Inundation in Your Community challenge is one of four climate-related challenges using data provided by NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The challenge encourages entrepreneurs, technologists, and developers to create and deploy data-driven visualizations and simulations that will help people understand their exposure to coastal-inundation hazards and other vulnerabilities.

“Solutions developed through this challenge could have many potential impacts,” said Stofan. "This includes helping coastal businesses determine whether they are currently at risk from coastal inundation, and whether they will be impacted in the future by sea level rise and coastal erosion."

The two-day International Space Apps Challenge will be a “codeathon”-style event locally hosted at almost 100 locations spanning six continents. More than 200 data sources, including data sets, data services, and tools will be made available. This event will bring tech-savvy citizens, scientists, entrepreneurs, educators, and students together to help solve challenges relevant to both space exploration and social needs.

"The International Space Apps Challenge is one of the U.S. commitments to the Open Government Partnership to explore new ways that open space data can help the planet and further space exploration," said Deborah Diaz, deputy chief information officer at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

This year, more than 40 new challenges will represent NASA mission priorities and be organized in five themes: Earth Watch, Technology in Space Human Spaceflight, Robotics, and Asteroids. About half of the challenges are in the Earth Watch theme, which supports NASA's focus on Earth science in 2014.

For the first time in more than a decade, five NASA Earth science missions are being launched into space in the same year, opening new and improved remote eyes to monitor our changing planet. The agency shares this unique knowledge with the global community and works with institutions in the United States and around the world that contribute to understanding and protecting our home planet.

Climate Data Initiative Launches; Challenge Announced At the Climate Data Initiative launch at the White House Wednesday, NASA Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan announced a new challenge -- Coastal Inundation in Your Community -- focused on coastal flooding, developed by NASA and NOAA, and based on federal cross-agency data.

Climate Data Initiative Launches; Challenge Announced

At the Climate Data Initiative launch at the White House Wednesday, NASA Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan announced a new challenge -- Coastal Inundation in Your Community -- focused on coastal flooding, developed by NASA and NOAA, and based on federal cross-agency data.

NASA's STEREO Studies Extreme Space Weather

NASA's STEREO Studies Extreme Space Weather

March 18, 2014

Scientists studied this unusually fast coronal mass ejection – shown here in a movie from NASA's STEREO-A from July 22, 2012, at 10:00 p.m. EDT until 2 a.m. on July 23 – to improve models of extreme space weather. Because the CME headed toward STEREO-A, it appears like a giant halo around the sun.

Image Credit: 

NASA/STEREO/Helioviewer

On July 22, 2012, a massive cloud of solar material erupted off the sun's right side, zooming out into space and passing one of NASA's twin Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, or STEREO, spacecraft along the way. Scientists clocked this giant cloud, known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME, as traveling over 1,800 miles per second as it left the sun.

Conversations began to buzz and the emails to fly: this was the fastest CME ever observed by STEREO, which since its launch in 2006 has helped make CME speed measurements much more precise. Measuring a CME at this speed, traveling in a direction safely away from Earth, represented a fantastic opportunity for researchers studying the sun's effects. Now, a paper in Nature Communications, published on March 18, 2014, describes how a combination of events worked together to create these incredible speeds.

"The authors believe this extreme event was due to the interaction of two CMEs separated by only 10 to 15 minutes," said Joe Gurman, project scientist for STEREO at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Plus the CMEs traveled through a region of space that had been cleared out by another CME four days earlier."

This image captured on July 23, 2012, at 12:24 a.m. EDT, shows a coronal mass ejection that left the sun at the unusually fast speeds of over 1,800 miles per second.

Image Credit: 

NASA/STEREO

› View full image

The researchers describe the July 2012 event as a perfect storm, referring to the phrase originally coined for the October 1991 Atlantic Ocean storm to describe an event where a rare combination of circumstances can drastically aggravate a situation.

Such work helps scientists understand how extreme solar events form and what their effects might be if aimed toward Earth. At Earth, the harshest space weather can have strong effects on the magnetic system surrounding the planet, which in turn can affect satellites and interrupt GPS and radio communications. At its worst, rapidly changing magnetic field lines around Earth can induce electric surges in the power utility grids on the ground. One of the best ways to protect against such problems, and perhaps learn to predict the onset of one of these storms, is to make computer models matching the observations of past events.

In the case of the July 2012 event, three spacecraft offered data on the CMEs: the two STEREO spacecraft and the joint European Space Agency/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO. SOHO lies between Earth and the sun, while the two STEREO spacecraft have orbits that for most of their journey give views of the sun that cannot be had from Earth. Each spacecraft observed the CMEs from a different angle, and together they could help map out a three-dimensional image of what happened.

The authors suggest it was the successive, one-two punch of the CMEs that was the key to the high speeds of the event – speeds that would lead to circling Earth five times in one minute.  A CME from four days earlier had an impact too. First, it swept aside particles in the way, making it all the easier for the next CMEs to travel.  Second, it altered the normal spiral of the magnetic fields around the sun to a straighter pattern above the region that was the source for these CMEs, thus allowing for freer movement.

"A key finding is that it’s not just the initial conditions on the sun that can produce an extreme space weather storm," said Gurman. "The interactions between successive coronal mass ejections farther out in interplanetary space need to be considered as well."

The researchers found that state-of-the-art models that didn't take the effects of successive CMEs into consideration failed to correctly simulate the July 2012 event.  Such information will be incorporated into the models being tested by space weather forecasters. This should lead to better predictions of the worst storms and better protection of Earth and our technology in space.

Related Links

STEREO Spacecraft Studies Extreme Space Weather

STEREO Spacecraft Studies Extreme Space Weather

On July 22, 2012, a massive cloud of solar material erupted off the sun's right side, zooming out into space and passing one of NASA's twin Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, or STEREO, spacecraft along the way. Scientists clocked this giant cloud, known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME, as traveling over 1,800 miles per second as it left the sun. This was the fastest CME ever observed by STEREO, which since its launch in 2006 has helped make CME speed measurements much more precise.

NASA Releases First Interactive Mosaic of Lunar North Pole

NASA Releases First Interactive Mosaic of Lunar North Pole

A new interactive mosaic from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter covers the north pole of the moon from 60 to 90 degrees north latitude at a resolution of 6-1/2 feet (2 meters) per pixel. Close-ups of Thales crater (right side) zoom in to reveal increasing levels of detail.

Image Credit: 

NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

Scientists, using cameras aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), have created the largest high resolution mosaic of our moon’s north polar region. The six-and-a-half feet (two-meters)-per-pixel images cover an area equal to more than one-quarter of the United States.

Web viewers can zoom in and out, and pan around an area. Constructed from 10,581 pictures, the mosaic provides enough detail to see textures and subtle shading of the lunar terrain. Consistent lighting throughout the images makes it easy to compare different regions.

"This unique image is a tremendous resource for scientists and the public alike," said John Keller, LRO project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "It's the latest example of the exciting insights and data products LRO has been providing for nearly five years."

The images making up the mosaic were taken by the two LRO Narrow Angle Cameras, which are part of the instrument suite known as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC). The cameras can record a tremendous dynamic range of lit and shadowed areas.

"Creation of this giant mosaic took four years and a huge team effort across the LRO project," said Mark Robinson, principal investigator for the LROC at Arizona State University in Tempe. "We now have a nearly uniform map to unravel key science questions and find the best landing spots for future exploration."

The entire image measures 931,070 pixels square – nearly 867 billion pixels total. A complete printout at 300 dots per inch – considered crisp resolution for printed publications – would require a square sheet of paper wider than a professional U.S. football field and almost as long. If the complete mosaic were processed as a single file, it would require approximately 3.3 terabytes of storage space. Instead, the processed mosaic was divided into millions of small, compressed files, making it manageable for users to view and navigate around the image using a web browser.

LRO entered lunar orbit in June 2009 equipped with seven instrument suites to map the surface, probe the radiation environment, investigate water and key mineral resources, and gather geological clues about the moon's evolution.

Researchers used additional information about the moon's topography from LRO's Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter, as well as gravity information from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission, to assemble the mosaic. Launched in September 2011, the GRAIL mission, employing twin spacecraft named Ebb and Flow, generated a gravity field map of the moon -- the highest resolution gravity field map of any celestial body.

LRO is managed by Goddard for the Science Mission Directorate (SMD) at NASA Headquarters in Washington. LROC was designed and built by Malin Space Science Systems and is operated by the University of Arizona. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., managed the GRAIL mission for SMD.

For more information about LRO, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/lro

To access the complete collection of LROC images, visit:

http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/

To view the image with zoom and pan capability, visit:

http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/gigapan