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Cut marks on a 4000-year-old skull suggest ancient Egyptian doctors tried to treat a man with nasopharyngeal cancer

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ESA’s EarthCARE satellite lifted off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, US, on 29 May at 00:20 CEST (28 May, 15:20 local time).

Developed as a cooperation between ESA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the Earth Cloud Aerosol and Radiation Explorer satellite carries a set of four instruments to make a range of different measurements that together will shed new light on the role that clouds and aerosols play in regulating Earth’s climate.

It’s coming back! Sunspot AR3664 gave us an amazing display of northern lights in mid-May and it’s now rotating back into view. That means another great display if this sunspot continues to flare out. It’s all part of solar maximum—the peak of an 11-year cycle of solar active and quiet times. This cycle is the result of something inside the Sun—the solar dynamo. A team of scientists suggests that this big generator lies not far beneath the solar surface. It creates a magnetic field and spurs flares and sunspots.

For a long time, solar physicists thought the magnetic dynamo was deep inside the Sun. That view may change thanks to work by researchers at MIT, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Colorado, Bates College, Northwestern University, and the University of California. The dynamo may be related to instabilities in what’s called the “near-surface shear layer” in the Sun’s outermost regions. The activities in this layer result in the flares and sunspots we see more of as the Sun nears “solar maximum”. Flares are high-energy outbursts while sunspots are surface features with local magnetic fields. Sunspots are relatively cool regions on the solar surface and occur in 11-year cycles.

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured these images of the solar flares — as seen in the bright flashes in the upper right — on May 5 and May 6, 2024. The image shows a subset of extreme ultraviolet light that highlights the extremely hot material in flares and which is colorized in teal. The loops are magnetic field lines channeling plasma. Credit: NASA/SDO

“The features we see when looking at the Sun, like the corona that many people saw during the recent solar eclipse, sunspots, and solar flares, are all associated with the sun’s magnetic field,” said MIT researcher Keaton Burns. “We show that isolated perturbations near the sun’s surface, far from the deeper layers, can grow over time to potentially produce the magnetic structures we see.”

How is the Sun’s Magnetic Field Connected to Activity?

To understand the magnitude of this finding, let’s look at the structure of the Sun. We all know the Sun is a superheated ball of plasma. So, how does boiling plasma create a magnetic dynamo? “One of the basic ideas for how to start a dynamo is that you need a region where there’s a lot of plasma moving past other plasma and that shearing motion converts kinetic energy into magnetic energy,” Burns explained. “People had thought that the Sun’s magnetic field is created by the motions at the very bottom of the convection zone.”

The interior structure of our Sun. The dynamo generating a magnetic field could lie very close to the solar surface. Credit: Kelvin Ma, via Wikipedia

Of course, pinning down the exact location of the solar dynamo in the upper layers is difficult. Simulations can only go so far, and modeling the plasma flow throughout the entire Sun is a massive computing task. So, Burns and the team decided simulate a smaller piece of the Sun. They studied the stability of plasma flow near the solar surface. That required helioseismology data showing vibrations on the Sun’s surface, which allowed them to determine the average flow of plasma in that region. “If you take a video of a drum and watch how it vibrates in slow motion, you can work out the drumhead’s shape and stiffness from the vibrational modes,” said Burns. “Similarly, we can use vibrations that we see on the solar surface to infer the average structure on the inside.”

Think of the Sun as layered like an onion. Different plasma layers rush past each other as the Sun rotates, according to Burns. “Then we ask: Are there perturbations, or tiny changes in the flow of plasma, that we could superimpose on top of this average structure, that might grow to cause the sun’s magnetic field?”

Computing an Answer

The team developed algorithms that they incorporated into a numerical framework called the Dedalus Project. They looked for self-reinforcing changes in the Sun’s average surface flows. The algorithm discovered new patterns that could grow and result in realistic solar activity. Interestingly, those patterns also match the locations and timescales of sunspots. It turns out that certain changes in the flow of plasma at the very top of the Sun’s surface layers generate magnetic structures. This isn’t a new idea. Burns pointed out that the conditions there resembled the unstable plasma flows in accretion disks around black holes. Accretion disks are massive collections of gas and stellar dust that rotate in towards a black hole. They’re driven by “magnetorotational instability,” which generates turbulence in the flow and causes it to fall inward.

Burns and the team thought this phenomenon at a black hole might also be at work inside our Sun. They suggest that magnetorotational instability in the Sun’s outermost layers could be the first step in generating its magnetic field. “I think this result may be controversial,” he said. “Most of the community has been focused on finding dynamo action deep in the Sun. Now we’re showing there’s a different mechanism that seems to be a better match to observations.”

Implications of the New Model

Not only will the team’s work help solar physicists understand the creation of the magnetic dynamo, but may give them insight into other solar phenomena. In particular, a dynamo in the upper 10 percent of the Sun may explain things like the Maunder Minimum. This was a period between 1645 to 1715 when there were very few sunspots. In some years, observers saw no sunspots at all. In other years, they observed fewer than 20. Astronomers did chart the 11-year sunspot cycle through that time, so the Sun wasn’t entirely inactive.

If the Sun’s magnetic dynamo operates in its outermost layers, the science of solar activity forecasting could get a big boost. Right now, it’s difficult to tell when a flare might break out. Flares and coronal mass ejections like those that contributed to the May 10-11 geomagnetic storm can damage satellites and telecommunications systems here on Earth. In addition, power grids and other technology are at risk. In the long run, however, gaining new understanding of the Sun’s dynamo is a big deal.

“We know the dynamo acts like a giant clock with many complex interacting parts,” says co-author Geoffrey Vasil, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh. “But we don’t know many of the pieces or how they fit together. This new idea of how the solar dynamo starts is essential to understanding and predicting it.”

For More Information

The Origin of the Sun’s Magnetic Field Could Lie Close to Its Surface
The Solar Dynamo Begins Near the Surface

The post The Sun’s Magnetic Field Might Only Be Skin Deep appeared first on Universe Today.

Start talking about Venus and immediately my mind goes to those images from the Venera space probes that visited Venus in the 1970’s. They revealed a world that had been scarred by millennia of volcanic activity yet as far as we could tell those volcanoes were dormant. That is, until just now.  Magellan has been mapping the surface of Venus and between 1990 and 1992 had mapped 98% of the surface. Researchers compared two scans of the same area and discovered that there were fresh outflows of molten rock filling a vent crater! There was active volcanism on Venus. 

Venus is the second planet from the Sun and similar in size to Earth, the similarities end there though. It has a thick atmosphere that is toxic to life as we know it, there is sulphuric acid rain high in the atmosphere and a surface temperature of almost 500 degrees. When the Venera probes visited they measured an atmospheric pressure of around 90 times that at the Earth’s surface. Combined with the other hostile properties of the atmosphere, a human visitor would not survive long. 

Venus

The dense atmosphere of Venus is largely the result of volcanic activity. Over the millennia, there have been extensive volcanic eruptions that pumped carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The lack of bodies of water on Venus meant the built up carbon dioxide in the atmosphere didn’t get absorbed. In addition to this, the lack of a magnetic field meant the solar wind – the pressure from the Sun – drove away the lighter elements leaving behind the thick, carbon dioxide rich atmosphere we see today. But the volcanoes that drove the atmospheric changes are thought to have been extinct for a long time. 

It’s not just the Venera probes that have been exploring Venus. In 1980, the Magellan spacecraft was launched by NASA to map the surface of the hottest planet in the Solar System. On arrival, it was put into a polar orbit and used radar to penetrate the thick clouds. Back in 2023, a study of some of the Magellan images from the synthetic aperture radar showed changes to a vent near the summit of Maat Mons. It was the first direct evidence of an eruption on the surface of Venus and changes in the lava flows. 

The surface of Venus captured by a Soviet Venera probe. Credit: Russian Academy of Sciences / Ted Stryk

In the latest study that was published in Nature Astronomy, more data from the synthetic aperture radar was studied. The team focussed on Sif Mons and Niobe Planitia and the data that had been collected from both areas in 1990 and again in 1992. The data revealed stronger radar returns in the later set of data suggesting new rock formations from volcanic activity. The team did consider it may have been caused by some other phenomena such as sand dunes or atmospheric effects but altimeter data confirmed the presence of new solidified lava. 

The team were able to use lava flows on Earth as a comparison to help understand the new flows on Venus. They estimated that the new flows are between 3 and 20 metres deep. They could go a step further though and estimated that the eruption at Sif Mons produced about 30 square kilometres of rock which would be enough to fill over 36,000 swimming pools.  The eruption at Niobe Planitia produced even more with an estimated 45 square kilometres of rock..

Studying volcanic activity on Venus helps to understand not just the geological processes but also helps to understand the structure of the interior too. This can help inform the likelihood of habitability for future explorers. None of which would have been possible without the recent volcanic activity to help us probe further the secrets of Venus.

Source: Ongoing Venus Volcanic Activity Discovered With NASA’s Magellan Data

The post Volcanoes Were Erupting on Venus in the 1990s appeared first on Universe Today.

ESA’s EarthCARE satellite, poised to revolutionise our understanding of how clouds and aerosols affect our climate, has been launched. This extraordinary satellite embarked on its journey into space on 29 May at 00:20 CEST (28 May, 15:20 local time) aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, US.

Russia's uncrewed Progress 86 cargo craft departed the International Space Station early Tuesday morning (May 28), ending a six-month orbital stay.

The largest camera ever built for astronomy arrived in Chile, where it will be installed atop Rubin Observatory's Simonyi Survey Telescope.

Venus may be as geologically active as Earth, with volcanoes possibly spewing on its surface in the present day.

A review of director Brad Peyton's new sci-fi adventure flick, "Atlas."

Semaglutide, the same compound in obesity drug Wegovy, slashes risk of kidney failure and death for people with type 2 diabetes

We’re fortunate to live in these times. Multiple space telescopes feed us a rich stream of astounding images that never seems to end. Each one is a portrait of some part of nature’s glory, enriched by the science behind it all. All we have to do is revel in the wonder.

The ESA’s Euclid space telescope is the latest one to enrich our inboxes. It was launched on July 1st, 2023, and delivered its first images in November of that year. Now, we have five new images from Euclid, as well as the first science results from the wide-angle space telescope.

“They give just a hint of what Euclid can do.”

Valeria Pettorino, ESA’s Euclid Project Scientist.

The images demonstrate the telescope’s power and its ability to address some of the deepest questions we have about the Universe. They are also impressive because of their visual richness and because they took only 24 hours of the telescope’s expected six years of observing time.

“Euclid is a unique, ground-breaking mission, and these are the first datasets to be made public – it’s an important milestone,” says Valeria Pettorino, ESA’s Euclid Project Scientist. “The images and associated science findings are impressively diverse in terms of the objects and distances observed. They include a variety of science applications, and yet represent a mere 24 hours of observations. They give just a hint of what Euclid can do. We are looking forward to six more years of data to come!”

The leading image is the most stunning and perhaps the most relatable. It shows Messier 78, aka NGC 2068. It’s a reflection nebula and star-forming region contained in the vast Orion B molecular cloud complex. Euclid used its infrared capabilities to see through the dust that shrouds the star-formation region. It’s given us our most detailed look at the filaments of gas and dust that give the region its ghostly appearance.

Euclid can detect objects that are just a few times more massive than Jupiter, an impressive feat. In its M78 image, it found over 300,000 objects in that mass range.

This zoomed-in portion of Euclid’s M78 image shows the depth the telescope’s images deliver. Image Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi. LICENCE CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

One of Euclid’s objectives is to study dark matter and how it’s distributed in the Universe. It uses gravitational lensing to probe dark matter, and its image of the Abell 2390 galaxy cluster exhibits the tell-tale curved arcs of light coming from distant background objects created by gravitational lensing. The image also shows more than 50,000 galaxies.

Euclid’s image of the Abell 2390 cluster of galaxies contains over 50,000 galaxies. It also shows the intracluster light that comes from individual stars torn from their galaxies and sitting in intergalactic space. These stars can help astrophysicists determine where dark matter is. Image Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi.
LICENCE: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Most of the stars currently forming in the Universe are forming in spiral galaxies. Euclid captured this image of NGC 6744 as an archetype of that galaxy type. The telescope’s wide-angle lens and depth of field capture the entire galaxy and also small details. It shows lanes of dust that emerge as spurs on the spiral arms.

With this image, astronomers can map individual stars and the gas that feeds their formation. They can also identify globular clusters and new dwarf galaxies. Euclid already found one new dwarf galaxy astronomers have never seen before, which is impressive for a galaxy that’s already been studied so intently.

Euclid’s complete image of NGC 6744 is on the left, and a zoomed-in portion is on the right. NGC 6744 is one of the largest spiral galaxies outside our region of space. The telescope’s detailed image will let astronomers count and map individual stars and the gas that feeds star formation. Star formation is how galaxies evolve, so studying NGC 6744’s star formation activity feeds into a greater understanding of galaxy evolution. Image Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi. LICENCE: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Euclid also imaged another galaxy cluster, Abell 2764. This cluster contains hundreds of galaxies within a halo of dark matter. Euclid’s impressive wide-field view comes into play in this image. Not only does it show Abell 2764 in the image’s upper right, but it also shows other clusters that are even more distant, multiple background galaxies, and interacting galaxies with their streams of stars.

In this image, Euclid captured galaxy cluster Abell 2764 and the wider region surrounding it. Abell 2764 is in the upper right corner. Image Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi LICENCE CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

The image highlights one of Euclid’s other capabilities. The foreground star is in our own galaxy, and when viewed with a telescope, its diffuse light creates a halo that obscures distant objects behind it. Euclid was built to minimize that diffuse halo effect. The disturbance from the star’s diffuse light is minimal, meaning Euclid can see distant background objects near the star’s line of sight.

This pair of zoomed-in images of Abell 2764 shows Euclid’s power. On the left is the foreground star. These stars can create halos of diffuse light that obscure other objects, but Euclid is built to minimize the effect. On the right is a zoom-in of Abell 2764 itself, with multitudes of background galaxies. Image Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi. LICENCE: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

The final of the five new images is of galaxies in the Dorado Group. Euclid’s image shows signs of galaxies merging. The Dorado Group is a relatively young group, and many of its member galaxies are still forming stars. The image helps astronomers study how galaxies form and evolve inside halos of dark matter.

The Dorado Group is one of the richest galaxy groups in the southern hemisphere. Euclid’s wide and deep images give astronomers their best look at it. Image Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi. LICENCE: ESA Standard Licence

A zoomed-in image shows more detail of the main pair of galaxies in the image. Euclid’s unique large field-of-view and high spatial resolution means that for the first time, astronomers can use the same instrument and observations to deeply study tiny objects the size of star clusters, intermediate objects like the central regions of galaxies, and larger features like tidal tails in one large region of the sky.

“The beauty of Euclid is that it covers large regions of the sky in great detail and depth, and can capture a wide range of different objects all in the same image – from faint to bright, from distant to nearby, from the most massive of galaxy clusters to small planets.”

ESA Director of Science, Prof. Carole Mundell

Prior to Euclid, astronomers had to use small chunks of data to painstakingly catalogue globular clusters around galaxies. But Euclid’s wide images capture far more data in a single image, simplifying the task. Globular clusters provide important clues to how galaxies evolve over time.

This zoom-in shows a pair of interacting galaxies in the Dorado Group. Tidal tails of stars are visible as wispy streams near the right and bottom right of the right-side galaxy. Image Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi. LICENCE: ESA Standard Licence

Euclid’s mission is only starting. The telescope’s images so far have no equivalent, and there’s much more to come. Euclid hasn’t even begun its main survey yet. That survey will comprise both a wide survey covering about 15,000 square degrees of the sky and a deep survey covering about 50 square degrees.

“It’s no exaggeration to say that the results we’re seeing from Euclid are unprecedented,” says ESA Director of Science, Prof. Carole Mundell. “Euclid’s first images, published in November, clearly illustrated the telescope’s vast potential to explore the dark Universe, and this second batch is no different.”

“The beauty of Euclid is that it covers large regions of the sky in great detail and depth, and can capture a wide range of different objects all in the same image – from faint to bright, from distant to nearby, from the most massive of galaxy clusters to small planets,” said Mundell. “We get both a very detailed and very wide view all at once. This amazing versatility has resulted in numerous new science results that, when combined with the results from Euclid’s surveying over the coming years, will significantly alter our understanding of the Universe.”

The scientific papers released with these images are available here.

The post Enjoy Five New Images from the Euclid Mission appeared first on Universe Today.

Astronaut Eugene A. Cernan, lunar module pilot, egresses the Apollo 10 spacecraft during recovery operations in the South Pacific. U.S. Navy underwater demolition team swimmers assisted in the recovery operations. Already in the life raft were astronauts Thomas P. Stafford (left), commander; and John W. Young, command module pilot. The three crewmen were picked up by helicopter and flown to the prime recovery ship, USS Princeton.

NASA

Astronaut Eugene A. Cernan, lunar module pilot for the Apollo 10 mission, exits the spacecraft during recovery operations on May 26, 1969. He and the other two crew members already in the raft, Thomas P. Stafford (left) and John W. Young, were brought to the prime recovery ship, USS Princeton after splashdown.

The Apollo 10 mission was the first flight of a complete, crewed Apollo spacecraft to operate around the Moon. It encompassed all aspects of an actual crewed lunar landing, except the landing.

See more photos from the Apollo 10 mission.

Image Credit: NASA

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Earth Science Information Partners Celebrate 25 Years of Collaboration

Allison Mills, Earth Science Information Partners, allisonmills@esipfed.org
Susan Shingledecker, Earth Science Information Partners, susanshingledecker@esipfed.org

Photo 1. Photo of some of the in-person participants of the July 2023 ESIP Meeting. ESIP celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2023. Founded as a knowledge sharing space, the nonprofit has grown as a collaborative data hub. Photo credit: Homer Horowitz/ Homer Horowitz Photography

Introduction

In 2023, the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) community celebrated 25 years since the nonprofit’s founding. Serving as a home for Earth science data and computing professionals, ESIP has evolved alongside the tools and vast expansion of Earth science data available now.

Building on the deep roots of collaboration that ground ESIP and honoring the 2023 Year of Open Science, the 2023 July ESIP Meeting’s theme focused on “Opening Doors to Open Science.” Open science is a collaborative culture enabled by technology that empowers the open sharing of data, information, and knowledge within the scientific community and the wider public to accelerate scientific research and understanding. This definition of open science comes from the 2021 article on the topic published in Earth and Space Science. (To learn more about how open science is being implemented within the context of NASA’s Earth Science Division – see Open Source Science: The NASA Earth Science Perspective, in the September–October 2021 issue of The Earth Observer [Volume 33, Issue 5, pp. 5–9, 11].)

Participants from around the world gathered July 18–21, 2023, in Burlington, VT to explore this theme. One of the strengths of the ESIP community is how it brings people together from government agencies, academia, and industry to work toward common goals. Altogether, nearly 400 attendees from nearly as many institutions, spanning many technical domains and career stages, gathered for the 4-day meeting, which featured a hybrid format that allowed for both in-person participation and virtual access to all plenaries and breakout sessions. Some of the in-person attendees are shown in Photo 1.

This article begins with a brief section on the history and purpose of ESIP followed by a summary of the highlights from each day of the July 2023 meeting. 

History and Purpose of ESIP

ESIP was created in response to a National Research Council (NRC) review of the Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS). (To learn more about EOSDIS, see Earth Science Data Operations: Acquiring, Distributing, and Delivering NASA Data for the Benefit of Society, in the March–April 2017 issue of The Earth Observer [Volume 29, Issue 2, pp. 4–18].) As NASA’s first Earth Observing System (EOS) missions were launching or preparing to launch, the NRC called on NASA to develop a new, distributed structure that would be operated and managed by the Earth science community and would include observation and research, application, and education data.

ESIP began with 24 NASA-funded partners, whose purpose was to experiment with and evolve methods to make Earth science data easy to preserve, locate, access, and use by a broad community encompassing research, education, and commercial interests. NASA adopted a deliberate and incremental approach in developing ESIP by starting with a limited set of prototype projects called ESIPs, representing both the research and applications development communities. These working prototype ESIP projects were joined by nine NASA distributed active archive centers (DAACs) to form the core of what was then known as the Federation of ESIPs and were responsible for creating its governing structures and the collaborative community it is today.

Although it started as a federation of partners connected due to a NASA mandate, ESIP has grown into an organization of organizations — and its membership has increased exponentially and diversified significantly. Today, there are more than 170 partner organizations – with room to grow. ESIP holds twice-annual meetings, which have run nonstop since 1998, and all past meeting material is available online. (To see an example of topics discussed at an early ESIP Federation meeting, see Meeting of the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners in the September–October 2001 issue of The Earth Observer [Volume 13, Issue 5, pp. 19–20, 26].)

ESIP also currently supports about 30 collaboration areas, which include 11 standing committees and numerous smaller clusters, or working groups. These committees and clusters conduct business both during and especially between meetings. ESIP also started the ESIP Lab, a microfunding initiative that supports learning objectives alongside technical skill-building. The establishment of an ESIP Community Fellows program has carved out a stronger foothold for early career professionals while the Awards, Endorsement, and programs offers knowledge sharing and recognition at all career stages.

ESIP still brings people together to work on complex Earth science issues — an important task that has not changed in over 25 years — but clearly the world is not the same as it was in 1998 when ESIP was established. This holds true for the hardware, software, remote sensing tools, and computing resources that have changed along with the people and communities who use them. In recognition of this, ESIP has developed a new mission and vision statements, and a new list of core values. A key moment in the 2023 July ESIP meeting (reported on below) was the revelation of these new statements, which were then refined during the meeting and voted on by the Board on July 17, 2023 — see ESIP Vision, Mission, and Core Value Statements below.

ESIP Vision and Mission Statements and Core Values

Vision. We envision a world where data-driven solutions are a reality for all by making Earth science data actionable by all who need them anytime, anywhere.

Mission. To empower innovative use and stewardship of Earth science data to solve our planet’s greatest challenges.

Core Values. Integrity, inclusiveness, collaboration, openness, and curiosity.

The new vision statement was intentionally worded to acknowledge how much power is at the fingertips of all data users. The new mission statement honors the depth of knowledge that is required to make data-driven decisions. Much like open science itself, there is a productive tension between wanting to make data as easy to use as possible while upholding the rigor of scientific standards.

All ESIP collaborations are open to everyone, whether an individual’s home institution is an ESIP partner or not.

Overview of the 2023 July ESIP Meeting

The 2023 July ESIP Meeting showcased how the attitudes, behaviors, connections, engagement, and responses of people to the natural environment as well as to agricultural and food systems – known as human dimensions – inform the ways the community tackles technical challenges and how important it is to gather, work together, and find inspiration. Summary highlights from the meeting follow – organized by day. All the meeting sessions were recorded and are available publicly through the ESIP YouTube channel. The reader is referred to these recordings to learn more about the topics mentioned here. 

The 2023 July ESIP meeting brought together 366 attendees – including 120 first-time participants. Through 4 plenaries and 44 breakout sessions, more than 100 organizers and speakers addressed the latest updates in Earth science data. Through the lens of open science, the community considered both the impact of the past 25 years of ESIP as well as how to move forward into the next quarter century. 

Opening Doors – and Knocking Down Barriers – to Open Science

Throughout its history, ESIP meetings have brought together the most innovative thinkers and leaders around Earth observation data, forming a community dedicated to making Earth observations more discoverable, accessible, and useful to researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and the public. Openness is simply how work is done in ESIP.

Many participants are drawn to ESIP’s approach, because they find roadblocks to open collaboration and innovation elsewhere. While the ESIP community values the transparency and accountability that is fundamental to open science processes, ESIP participants also recognize the challenges in implementing those practices more broadly.

The 2023 July meeting was an excellent example. The “Opening Doors to Open Science” theme provided a space for participants to talk honestly about the institutional inertia, lack of incentives, and unintended consequences that hinder the open science approach. Often, the barriers are specific to particular domains, organizations, or roles. The ESIP meeting content explored such challenges – and solutions – for researchers, agencies, repositories, data managers, software developers, curriculum designers, and many other groups.

Daniel Segessenman [ESIP Community Fellow] explains his poster at the Research Showcase in Burlington, VT. Photo credit: Homer Horowitz

DAY ONE

Susan Shingledecker [ESIP—Executive Director] gave the opening remarks and rallied the audience with interactive activities codesigned with Charley Haley [Way Foragers Consulting]. As a collaborative space, ESIP often breaks the norm of lecture-and-listen modes. The discussion and audience-driven talking points helped the community frame the week’s explorations of open science in Earth science data and computing.

Ken Casey [NOAA, National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI)—Deputy Chief of Data Stewardship and ESIP President 2021–2023] shared ESIP’s new mission, vision, and core values.

Kari Jordan [The Carpentries—Chief Executive Officer (CEO)] addressed the importance of authentic diversity and inclusion as a key function of open science. While she laid out systemic issues and barriers, her presentation focused mostly on action and solutions. She advised the ESIP community to use the organization’s core values and mission to continue opening doors to communities that have been historically left out of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) careers, leadership, and tech development.

The rest of the day was filled with rich, deep dives into many Earth science data and computing topics. Notable highlights include the hands-on, knowledge-sharing sessions led by the ESIP Cloud Computing Cluster, chaired by Aimee Barciauskas [Development Seed]. The sessions – from kerchunk tutorials to overviews of geospatial packages for the Python programming language, to lightning talks where speakers gave walkthroughs of tools used for cloud computing applications (e.g. GeoZarr, a geospatial extension to the Zarr specification for processing multidimensional arrays, or tensors, and storing and manipulating them on the cloud, and JupyterHub) – were often standing room only.

In addition to exploring technical tools, another breakout session motif centered around discussions on engaging stakeholders. One session featured Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux [University of Vermont—State Climatologist], who spoke about climate preparedness for small communities, which was particularly relevant in light of the record-setting flooding that had taken place in Vermont just prior to the meeting. In another session, a team from NASA, including Grace Llewellyn [NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory—Software Engineer], Stephanie Schollaert Uz [NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC)—Applied Sciences Manager], and Jennifer Wei [GSFC—Scientist] alongside their collaborators Robert Gradeck [University of Pittsburgh], Mukul Sonwalkar [George Mason University], and Michiaki Tatsubori [IBM Research– Tokyo—Senior Technical Staff Member and Manager], focused on broader collaborations for natural disaster response. Several other sessions focused on specific end users in data centers, repositories, and universities.

DAY TWO

The second day of ESIP’s in-person meetings was nicknamed “Workshop Wednesday.” The day began with the ESIP Lab Plenary, followed by longer, in-depth sessions, and capped with the crowd-favorite Research Showcase Poster and Demo Reception.

Annie Burgess [ESIP—ESIP Lab Director] gave the opening remarks and welcomed Corine Farewell [University of Vermont Innovations] to share her perspective on open science and technology transfer. Many in the research community see the two at odds fundamentally – which the audience made clear during the question-and-answer session – but Farewell laid out how interactions between open science and technology transfer can open opportunities to tailor licensing and rollouts and to help ensure technology is shared and supported.

Scott Reinhard [New York Times—Graphics Editor] took the stage and showed a room full of data managers, researchers, and program directors just how powerful their work can be with the right color choice and analytical filtering for an audience’s intuitive ease – see Figure. As a data visualization expert, Reinhard laid out his creative process for making award-winning news graphics, built with data from sources such as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra and Aqua platforms, and from instruments on NASA–U.S. Geological Survey Landsat missions. His advice during the question-and-answer session was that “less is more.” He said sharing data with public audiences should be about meeting their needs with clarity and succinctness, which means removing ancillary data that is often included in more dense, scientific presentations.

Figure. This graphic shows an example of work by Scott Reinhard [New York Times], who uses national and state geospatial data to create data visualizations for broad audiences. This map depicts the Dixie Fire in California in 2021 and is shown in a newsprint layout. Figure Credit: Scott Reinhard/New York Times

The rest of the day continued with community-led breakout sessions that dove into additional tools like OPeNDAP, Amazon Web Service’s SageMaker, and open data resources in NASA’s Earth Science Division. The day also featured a special plated lunch with presentations from ESIP Award winners. Falkenberg Awardees Angelia Seyfferth [University of Delaware] and Raskin Scholar Alexis Garretson [Tufts University] each shared their domain specialties, Seyfferth focusing on arsenic uptake in crops and Garretson on the ecology of mouse genomes.

In the afternoon, the ESIP Education Committee led the annual ESIP Teacher’s Workshop. The organizers brought together about a dozen instructors keen to learn more about Earth science data tools for use in their middle and high school classrooms. Every participant was given a solar eclipse kit, including eclipse glasses and lesson plans – see Photo 2.

The evening concluded with the Research Showcase, which featured 47 posters and demonstrations. This is a particularly important event for early career meeting attendees, including the ESIP Community Fellows.

Photo 2. The ESIP Teacher Workshop took participants outside to test the solar eclipse gear they will use in their classrooms. Photo credit: Homer Horowitz

DAY THREE

While there was no plenary to start the day, breakout sessions continued throughout the morning and late afternoon. Covering artificial intelligence (AI) tools for wildfires, the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030), and the Ocean Decade, these ESIP sessions spanned the interdisciplinary breadth of the community. While many attendees have different backgrounds and career paths, it is the technical challenges and opportunities that bring everyone together.

A longer scheduled lunch break transitioned to the unconference, a space for on-the-fly and emergent discussions. Organizers pitched their mini-session ideas, the audience voted, then everyone split into discussion groups similar to organized coffee-break hallway chats. ESIP meeting feedback data shows that in-person attendees value time to integrate new knowledge and network; a short unconference has proven to be a productive way to encourage this.

Another key networking opportunity was the FUNding Friday microfunding competition. On Thursday night, participants gathered at a local eatery to ideate, write, and even draw their projects, which would be pitched the next morning.

DAY FOUR

While short, the final day of the ESIP meeting proved to be lively. The morning started with the FUNding Friday pitches and voting followed by the closing plenary and Partner Assembly Business meeting. The day concluded with the final breakout sessions, which highlighted the human and social aspects of implementing open science in an Earth data context. From the process of public comments to AI and large-language models, the breakouts illustrated how entangled human challenges are with technical and environmental ones.

Conclusion

Celebrating the organization’s twenty-fifth anniversary at the 2023 July ESIP Meeting tapped into the community’s deep roots while highlighting how much the gathering has grown and evolved. Over the next 25 years, the Earth sciences and its technology will continue to expand – and so will the user base.

To help make Earth science data and its tools accessible, ESIP is committed to making its meetings as open as possible. All ESIP meeting content is made freely available on the ESIP YouTube channel with no time limit.

In general, the ESIP community is open to all people interested in making Earth science data accessible and actionable. The community gathers twice each year in January and July, but the ESIP Collaboration Areas host monthly gatherings throughout the year. Additionally, the ESIP Lab offers seed funding for pilot projects.

Readers who wish to stay informed on the latest from ESIP, Earth science data community events, jobs, and resources are invited to subscribe to the weekly ESIP Update. The next ESIP meeting will take place in July 2024; watch the ESIP website and other social media for more details.

SpaceX launched the EarthCARE mission this afternoon (May 28) after sending aloft a group of Starlink internet satellites this morning.

The European Space Agency has now released ten images from its dark universe detective spacecraft, Euclid. We asked scientists from various fields to pick their favorite Euclid image thus far.

Artist’s concept of a previously proposed possible planet, HD 26965 b – often compared to the fictional “Vulcan” in the Star Trek universe. Credit: JPL-Caltech The discovery

A planet thought to orbit the star 40 Eridani A – host to Mr. Spock’s fictional home planet, Vulcan, in the “Star Trek” universe – is really a kind of astronomical illusion caused by the pulses and jitters of the star itself, a new study shows.

Key facts

The possible detection of a planet orbiting a star that Star Trek made famous drew excitement and plenty of attention when it was announced in 2018. Only five years later, the planet appeared to be on shaky ground when other researchers questioned whether it was there at all. Now, precision measurements using a NASA-NSF instrument, installed a few years ago atop Kitt Peak in Arizona, seem to have returned the planet Vulcan even more definitively to the realm of science fiction.

Details

Two methods for detecting exoplanets – planets orbiting other stars – dominate all others in the continuing search for strange new worlds. The transit method, watching for the tiny dip in starlight as a planet crosses the face of its star, is responsible for the vast majority of detections. But the “radial velocity” method also has racked up a healthy share of exoplanet discoveries. This method is especially important for systems with planets that don’t, from Earth’s point of view, cross the faces of their stars. By tracking subtle shifts in starlight, scientists can measure “wobbles” in the star itself, as the gravity of an orbiting planet tugs it one way, then another. For very large planets, the radial velocity signal mostly leads to unambiguous planet detections. But not-so-large planets can be problematic.

Even the scientists who made the original, possible detection of planet HD 26965 b – almost immediately compared to the fictional Vulcan – cautioned that it could turn out to be messy stellar jitters masquerading as a planet. They reported evidence of a “super-Earth” – larger than Earth, smaller than Neptune – in a 42-day orbit around a Sun-like star about 16 light-years away. The new analysis, using high-precision radial velocity measurements not yet available in 2018, confirms that caution about the possible discovery was justified.

The bad news for Star Trek fans comes from an instrument known as NEID, a recent addition to the complex of telescopes at Kitt Peak National Observatory. NEID, like other radial velocity instruments, relies on the “Doppler” effect: shifts in the light spectrum of a star that reveal its wobbling motions. In this case, parsing out the supposed planet signal at various wavelengths of light, emitted from different levels of the star’s outer shell, or photosphere, revealed significant differences between individual wavelength measurements – their Doppler shifts – and the total signal when they were all combined. That means, in all likelihood, the planet signal is really the flickering of something on the star’s surface that coincides with a 42-day rotation – perhaps the roiling of hotter and cooler layers beneath the star’s surface, called convection, combined with stellar surface features such as spots and “plages,” which are bright, active regions. Both can alter a star’s radial velocity signals.

While the new finding, at least for now, robs star 40 Eridani A of its possible planet Vulcan, the news isn’t all bad. The demonstration of such finely tuned radial velocity measurements holds out the promise of making sharper observational distinctions between actual planets and the shakes and rattles on surfaces of distant stars.

Fun facts

Even the destruction of Vulcan has been anticipated in the Star Trek universe. Vulcan was first identified as Spock’s home planet in the original 1960s television series. But in the 2009 film, “Star Trek,” a Romulan villain named Nero employs an artificial black hole to blow Spock’s home world out of existence.

The discoverers

A science team led by astronomer Abigail Burrows of Dartmouth College, and previously of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, published a paper describing the new result, “The death of Vulcan: NEID reveals the planet candidate orbiting HD 26965 is stellar activity,” in The Astronomical Journal in May 2024 (Note: HD 26965 is an alternate designation for the star, 40 Eridani A.)

Do galaxies, including our own Milky Way, orbit anything in the universe?

Two Chinese astronauts spent about 8.5 hours outside the Tiangong space station today (May 28), setting a new spacewalk-duration record for the country.

2 min read

Arizona Students Go on an Exoplanet Watch  The instructor, teaching assistant, and students from the online exoplanet research course meeting synchronously via Zoom.
From left to right and top to bottom: Suber Corley, Molly Simon (instructor), Kimberly Merriam, Bradley Hutson, Elizabeth Catogni, Heather Hewitt (teaching assistant), Steve Marquez-Perez, Fred Noguer, Matthew Rice, Ty Perry, Mike Antares, Zachary Ruybal, Chris Kight, Kellan Reagan. Credit: Image collected by Molly Simon

Exoplanets, planets outside of our own solar system, hold the keys to finding extraterrestrial life and understanding the origin of our own world. Now online students at Arizona State University (ASU) in a new course called Exoplanet Research Experience have become exoplanet scientists by taking part in NASA’s Exoplanet Watch project. 

Fifteen students from ASU’s Astronomical and Planetary Sciences online degree program enroll in this course each year. These students analyze data on transits, events where the exoplanets block some of the light from their host stars. Each week, the class meets via Zoom to discuss progress, answer questions, and go over assignments. Students begin by completing a module from an online astrobiology course called Habitable Worlds, which is supported by NASA’s Infiniscope project. During the last 5 weeks of the course, students work to consolidate their work into a paper draft that is later submitted to a peer-reviewed journal with all of the students listed as co-authors. 

“I think [the class] changed the course of my life…” said one student. “Not just in my confidence, but just knowing that people in the field have my back…I have tremendous support from them.” 

“This course definitely helped kind of show what exactly scientists do and what the expectation is…especially for an online program, to have research opportunities is a great help…” another student said. 

After participating in the course, students have gone on to participate in other research experiences, write their own first-author papers, participate in internships, and present their research at national astronomy conferences.  An assessment of student outcomes was recently published in the Physics Review Physics Education Research Journal.

You don’t need to go to ASU to do real exoplanet research. Anyone can help collect and analyze exoplanet data through Exoplanet Watch, whether you own a telescope or just want to help analyze data. Visit the NASA Exoplanet Watch website to get started!

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Last Updated

May 28, 2024

Related Terms

• Astrophysics
• Citizen Science
• Exoplanets
• The Universe

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