Theories Fly Over Giant Black Hole in Siberia

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Huge asteroid named 'Beast' to fly by Earth on Sunday

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Proof of Magnetic Pole Flip Coming: Things you Can See Now!

Mary Greeley

Scientists Say Destructive Solar Blasts Narrowly Missed Earth in 2012

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Este gráfico te dice a qué velocidad te estás moviendo debido a la rotación de la Tierra

microsiervos

Vizual Statistix / Seth Kadish.

Dependiendo de en qué parte del planeta se encuentre uno el movimiento circular debido a la rotación de la Tierra sobre su eje es mayor o menor. En el ecuador esta velocidad es de unos 1600 km/h y en cambio cerca de en los polos la velocidad del movimiento circular se reduce y llega a ser cero, ninguno. Aquí en España estamos girando a unos 1300 km/h según este gráfico de Vizual Statistix.

Lo anterior sin contar la velocidad con la que la Tierra se mueve alrededor del Sol ni la velocidad con la que el Sol se desplaza por el espacio.

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NASA space telescope spots new asteroid

Track Europe's falling, 2,000-pound satellite in real-time

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2,000-pound satellite is going to fall, but where?

foxnews

By Jeremy A. Kaplan

Who do you sue if you’re hit by a satellite?
A defunct satellite from the European Space Agency the size of a Chevy Suburban is set to plunge to Earth somewhere between Sunday night and Monday afternoon -- and experts say there's no way to precisely determine where it will crash.
GOCE, or Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer, ran out of gas last month and has been steadily sinking towards the Earth. As the planet rotates, the satellite whizzes over nearly every point on Earth. Experts expect it to plunge harmlessly into the oceans that cover 70 percent of the surface of the planet. But what if it doesn’t? What if it takes out your old Accord?

Making Odds

Gambling houses will take bets on more or less anything. Here's the odds (as of Saturday morning) on the GOCE satellite crashing down on different continents, British gaming company Ladbrokes told FoxNews.com. North and South America: 6/4 Russia and Asia: 2/1 Africa: 4/1 Europe: 5/1 Australia: 10/1 Bets are void if it lands in the sea, the company noted

“Basically, governments are responsible for their own spacecraft,” explained Marcia S. Smith, president of the Space and Technology Policy Group in Arlington, Va. “[If] you could prove a piece of GOCE hit your Honda, you could go to your government to make a claim,” she told FoxNews.com.
     WHERE IS IT NOW? Track the GOCE satellite here
But don’t put the ESA’s lawyer on speed dial just yet. Most of the fragments of the satellite are likely to burn up on re-entry, said Heiner Klinkrad, Head of ESA’s Space Debris Office according to an ESA blog.
“Most of these fragments will completely burn up. A small fraction of the initial spacecraft mass -- about 20 percent or 200 kilograms [440 pounds] -- is expected to reach ground, distributed across dozens of fragments, spread over a sizable re-entry ground swath.”
400 pounds of smoking metal spread over a "sizeable swath" is nothing to sniff at. But should one of those fragments land on U.S. soil, you’re fully covered, according to the United Nations. The U.N.’s Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects was created in September of 1972, and has been ratified by 88 countries and signed by 22 nations as of January 1, 2013.
“A launching State shall be absolutely liable to pay compensation for damage caused by its space object on the surface of the Earth or to aircraft in flight,” reads the policy. And the GOCE satellite was launched from Russia, so that country would be responsible, said Mark Hopkins chairman of the executive committee of the National Space Society.
While space objects reenter the atmosphere all the time, few pieces survive the fiery trip and many of those end up in the ocean, Smith said. But sometimes, they do. Russia's Cosmos 954 satellite crashed in Canada in 1978, with a radioactive energy source. That sounds more alarming than it actually was; the element was “vanishingly small” when it hit ground, Hopkins said. But Canada did try to get money back from the Russians -- and they did pay up, he said.
“It was a lot less than they wanted,” he told FoxNews.com.
Indeed, the Canadian government asked for $6 million to cover cleanup and "future unpredicted expenses," according to Matthew Kleinman's "The Little Book of Space Law." Russia paid half that. It's up to a government to bring charges, according to the policy book.
"Had a Canadian citizen been injured by the Cosmos 954 debris, his only recourse would have been to either convince the Canadian government to bring a claim against the Soviet Union on his behalf or bring a claim on his own behalf in a national court with appropriate jurisdiction. If he won his case, he would then have had to hope that the Soviet government honored the court's judgment," the book notes.
So if you hear a crash in the night, rest assured that the responsible party will most likely pick up the tab. Just make sure to take a picture.

Meet the asteroid that might hit Earth in 2880

Fox News

Radar image of 1950 DA acquired by the Arecibo Observatory on March 4, 2001. (NASA/JPL/S. Ostro)

By Jason Majors/
There are over 10,000 near-Earth objects (NEOs) that have been identified so far — asteroids and comets of varying sizes that approach the Earth’s orbital distance to within about 28 million miles. Of the 10,000 discoveries, roughly 10 percent are larger than six-tenths of a mile in size — large enough to have disastrous global consequences should one impact the Earth.
This is one of them.
First discovered in February 1950, 1950 DA is a 1.1-kilometer-wide asteroid that was observed for 17 days and then disappeared from view. Then it was spotted again on Dec. 31, 2000 — literally on the eve of the 21st century. Coupled with radar observations made a few weeks later in March 2001 it was found that, along with a rather high rotation rate (2.1 hours), asteroid 1950 DA has a trajectory that will bring it very close to Earth on March 16, 2880. How close? Close enough that, within a specific 20-minute window, a collision can not be entirely ruled out.
Top 10 Ways to Stop an Asteroid
The image above was made from radar observations by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico in March 2001, when 1950 DA passed within 4.8 million miles of Earth. Is this the mug shot of a future continent-killer?
Radar analysis and research of 1950 DA performed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists J.D. Giorgini, S. J. Ostro, Don Yeomans and several others from JPL and other institutions revealed that the impact probability from 1950 DA in March 2880 is, at most, 1 in 300 based on what is known about the asteroid so far.
1 in 300 may sound like a slim chance, but actually this represents a risk 50% greater than that of the average hazard due to all other asteroids from now to then.
However, that’s a maximum value. The study also noted the collision probability for 1950 DA as being in the range from 0 to 0.33%. That upper limit could increase or decrease as more is learned about the asteroid. (The next opportunity for studying 1950 DA via radar is in 2032.)
There are many factors that influence the path of an asteroid through space. Its spin rate, reflectivity (albedo), composition, mass, terrain variations… gravitational interactions with other bodies, some of which may not even have been discovered yet… all of these can affect the movement of an asteroid and, more specifically, its exact position at a future point in time. While many of these things still aren’t precisely known for 1950 DA, one in particular could end up being the saving grace for our descendants: the Yarkovsky effect.
PHOTOS: Russian Meteor Strike Aftermath
A small but important force acting upon asteroids, the Yarkovsky effect is a “nudge” created by thermal emission. As an asteroid gathers heat energy from the sun, it releases some of that energy back into space. Thanks to Newtonian mechanics the sheer act of doing so creates a physical push back on the asteroid itself, altering its course ever so slightly. Over a long span of time, this slight alteration could result in the relocation of 1950 DA away from the spot in space where Earth will be on March 16, 2880… at least enough so that a miss is certain.
In fact, recent research by JPL scientists D. Farnocchia and S.R. Chesley have taken into consideration the Yarkovsky effect on 1950 DA based on known values from previous observations, as well as new research suggesting that the asteroid has a retrograde rotation. While their latest assessment does put the risk of an impact in 2880 within the lower end of the probability spectrum (4×10^-4, or -0.58 on the Palermo Scale) it is still far from zero, and in fact remains higher than any other known potential impacts.
PHOTOS: NASA’s Asteroid Capture Mission
So what would happen if the half-mile-wide 1950 DA were to hit Earth? While that depends on a lot of things, such as its composition, speed, angle of impact, where it impacts, etc., needless to say it would cause a lot of damage across a large area. I’m talking an energy release upwards of half a million megatons, which, were it to strike say, New York City, everything within at least a 100-mile radius would be flattened by the force of the impact alone — that’s halfway to Boston and Washington, DC. And that’s not even taking into consideration the air blast, atmospheric dust cloud, secondary impacts from debris, or damage from any resulting tsunami (if the impact were in the ocean)… the destruction would easily extend out many more hundreds of miles, and the repercussions — physical, financial, economic, and emotional — would extend around the globe.
But again, precisely where 1950 DA will be in another 866 1/2 years (and whether or not it will occupy the same point in space as our planet) relies on many factors that aren’t well known — even though its orbit is pretty well understood. More in-depth observations will need to be made, and that is why asteroids like this must be carefully — and continually — watched.
Luckily, 35 generations offers plenty of time to improve our knowledge. According to JPL’s Near-Earth Object program, “If it is eventually decided 1950 DA needs to be diverted, the hundreds of years of warning could allow a method as simple as dusting the surface of the asteroid with chalk or charcoal, or perhaps white glass beads, or sending a solar sail spacecraft that ends by collapsing its reflective sail around the asteroid. These things would change the asteroids reflectivity and allow sunlight to do the work of pushing the asteroid out of the way.”
ANALYSIS: Meet Asteroid 2013 MZ5, 10,000th Near-Earth Object
Still, whether because of ongoing research, faith in future generations of scientists, or just sheer probability, JPL remains confident that 1950 DA should cause little concern. “The most likely result will be that St. Patrick’s Day parades in 2880 will be a little more festive than usual as 1950 DA recedes into the distance, having passed Earth by.”
Let’s just hope the luck of the Irish is with our planet big time that year…

Godspeed: Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter dies at 88

 

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UN Struggles with Data Suggesting No Global Warming

breitbart

By William Bigelow 

The United Nations, ever eager to embrace global warming, has a new climate report to be released that claims scientists are more certain than ever that global warming is real, but now there is hard evidence that global surface temperatures have stabilized over the last 15 years according to the U.K.’s weather-watching Met Office.

In June, David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundation wrote, "The absence of any significant change in the global annual average temperature over the past 16 years has become one of the most discussed topics in climate science. It has certainly focused the debate about the relative importance of greenhouse gas forcing of the climate versus natural variability."

Of course, climate change advocates are trying their best to offer an explanation for the lack of global warming; a draft of the AR5 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is due to be published in Oct. 2014, tries its best to address the situation. As Reuters environment correspondent Alister Doyle cited from the report:

Scientists believe causes could include: greater-than-expected quantities of ash from volcanoes, which dims sunlight; a decline in heat from the sun during a current 11-year solar cycle; more heat being absorbed by the deep oceans; or the possibility that the climate may be less sensitive than expected to a build-up of carbon dioxide.

The draft hedges its bets, stating that it has “medium confidence: that the global warming halt is due “in roughly equal measure” to the aforementioned factors.

The U.N. hurriedly tried to hedge its bets, too, saying of the draft:

The text is likely to change in response to comments from governments received in recent weeks and will also be considered by governments and scientists at a four-day approval session at the end of September. It is therefore premature and could be misleading to attempt to draw conclusions from it.

But just as the report stated that 95% of scientists believe that man’s actions cause global warming, climate change advocates quickly reasserted their belief in their omniscience; climate scientist Michael Mann wrote, “The report is simply an exclamation mark on what we already knew: Climate change is real and it continues unabated, the primary cause is fossil fuel burning, and if we don’t do something to reduce carbon emissions we can expect far more dangerous and potentially irreversible impacts on us.”

Asteroid 1998 QE2 has a moon, radar shows

cosmiclog

By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

When astronomers analyzed radar readings to create their first maps of 1998 QE2, the big asteroid that's due to sail past Earth on Friday, they were surprised to find that it has a moon twice as big as an ocean liner.

1998 QE2 itself is way bigger: The latest readings from NASA's Deep Space Network antenna in Goldstone, Calif., are consistent with earlier estimates that the asteroid is about 1.7 miles (2.7 kilometers wide). But the moon is hefty as well. Astronomers estimate its diameter at 2,000 feet (600 meters). That's big enough to wipe out an area of the size of Virginia if it were to strike land.

Fortunately, neither space rock will come any closer than 3.6 million miles (5.8 million kilometers), or about 15 times the distance between Earth and the moon, during a flyby that reaches its climax at 4:59 p.m. ET Friday.

Even though Earth is in no danger, the close encounter is stirring up interest because it gives astronomers a rare opportunity to see an asteroid up close. Such observations could help NASA plan for efforts as the Osiris-Rex mission, which will bring back a sample from the asteroid Bennu in 2023; and an even more ambitious mission to corral an asteroid by the mid-2020s.

Goldstone's first radar observations of 1998 QE2 were made on Wednesday evening, producing images with a resolution of about 250 feet (75 meters) per pixel. The pictures show that QE2 has a rotation period of less than four hours, and is marked by several dark surface features that are suggestive of large craters. In an image advisory, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says that the image resolution will get better as more radar readings become available, from Goldstone as well as the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

Oldest water on Earth found deep underground

Science

B. Sherwood Lollar et al.

A scientist takes a sample of water from a mine deep
 underground in Ontario, Canada. The water turned 
out to be 2.6 billion years old, the oldest known
 water on Earth.

By Charles Q. Choi
LiveScience
A pocket of water some 2.6 billion years old — the most ancient pocket of water known by far, older even than the dawn of multicellular life — has now been discovered in a mine 2 miles below the Earth's surface.
The finding, announced in the May 16 issue of the journal Nature, raises the tantalizing possibility that ancient life might be found deep underground not only within Earth, but in similar oases that may exist on Mars, the scientists who studied the water said.
Geoscientist Barbara Sherwood Lollar at the University of Toronto and her colleagues have investigated deep mines across the world since the 1980s. Water can flow into fractures in rocks and become isolated deep in the crust for many years, serving as a time capsule of what their environments were like at the time they were sealed off.
In gold mines in South Africa 1.7 miles (2.8 kilometers) deep, the scientists previously discovered microbes could survive in pockets of waterisolated for tens of millions of years. These reservoirs were many times saltier than seawater, "and had chemistry in many ways similar to hydrothermal vents on the bottom of the ocean, full of dissolved hydrogen and other chemicals capable of supporting life," Sherwood Lollar said. [Strangest Places Where Life Is Found on Earth]
To see what other ancient pockets of water might exist, Sherwood Lollar and her colleagues investigated copper and zinc mines near the city of Timmins in Ontario, Canada. "As the prices of copper, zinc and gold have gone up, mines now go deeper, which has helped our search for long-isolated reservoirs of water hidden underground," Sherwood Lollar said.
'Mind-blowing' find"Sometimes we went down in cages — they're not called elevators underground — that dropped us to the levels we wanted to go," Sherwood Lollar told OurAmazingPlanet. "Other times, we went down ramp mines, which have curling spiral roadways, so we could actually drive all the way down."
The scientists analyzed water they found 2 miles (2.4 km) deep. They focused on noble gases such as helium, neon, argon and xenon. Past studies analyzing bubbles of air trapped within ancient rocks found that these rare gases could occur in distinct ratios linked with certain eras of Earth's history. As such, by analyzing the ratios of noble gases seen in this water, the researchers could deduce the age of the water.
The scientists discovered the fluids were trapped in the rocks between 1.5 billion and 2.64 billion years ago.
"It was absolutely mind-blowing," Sherwood Lollar said. "These weren't tens of millions of years old like we might have expected, or even hundreds of millions of years old. They were billions of years old."
The site was formed by geological activity similar to that seen in hydrothermal vents. "We walked along what used to be ocean floor 2.7 billion years ago," Sherwood Lollar said. "You could still see some of the same pillow lava structures now seen on the bottom of the ocean."
Signs of life?This ancient water poured out of the boreholes the team drilled in the mine at the rate of nearly a half-gallon (2 liters) per minute. It remains uncertain precisely how large this reservoir of water is.
"This is an extremely important question and one that we want to pursue in our future work," Sherwood Lollar said. "We also want to see if there are habitable reservoirs of similar age around the world."
Sherwood Lollar emphasized they have not yet found any signs of life in the water from Timmins. "We're working on that right now," she said. "It'd be fascinating to us if we did, since it'd push back the frontiers of how long life could survive in isolation."
And the implications of such a finding would extend beyond the extremes of life on Earth.
"Finding life in this energy-rich water is especially exciting if one thinks of Mars, where there might be water of similar age and mineralogy under the surface," Sherwood Lollar said.
If any life once arose on Mars billions of years ago as it did on Earth, "then it is likely in the subsurface," Sherwood Lollar said. "If we find the water in Timmins can support life, maybe the same might hold true for Mars as well."

Melting Glaciers, Sprawling Cities: the Google Project

Computer Scientists Suggest New Spin On Origins Of Evolvability

By Eurasia Review

www.sciencedaily.com

Scientists have long observed that species seem to have become increasingly capable of evolving in response to changes in the environment. But computer science researchers now say that the popular explanation of competition to survive in nature may not actually be necessary for evolvability to increase.

In a paper published this week in PLOS ONE, the researchers report that evolvability can increase over generations regardless of whether species are competing for food, habitat or other factors.

Using a simulated model they designed to mimic how organisms evolve, the researchers saw increasing evolvability even without competitive pressure.

“The explanation is that evolvable organisms separate themselves naturally from less evolvable organisms over time simply by becoming increasingly diverse,” said Kenneth O. Stanley, an associate professor at the College of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Central Florida. He co-wrote the paper about the study along with lead author Joel Lehman, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin.

The finding could have implications for the origins of evolvability in many species.

“When new species appear in the future, they are most likely descendants of those that were evolvable in the past,” Lehman said. “The result is that evolvable species accumulate over time even without selective pressure.”

During the simulations, the team’s simulated organisms became more evolvable without any pressure from other organisms out-competing them. The simulations were based on a conceptual algorithm.

“The algorithms used for the simulations are abstractly based on how organisms are evolved, but not on any particular real-life organism,” explained Lehman.

The team’s hypothesis is unique and is in contrast to most popular theories for why evolvability increases.

“An important implication of this result is that traditional selective and adaptive explanations for phenomena such as increasing evolvability deserve more scrutiny and may turn out unnecessary in some cases,” Stanley said.

Stanley is an associate professor at UCF. He has a bachelor’s of science in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and a doctorate in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin. He serves on the editorial boards of several journals. He has over 70 publications in competitive venues and has secured grants worth more than $1 million. His works in artificial intelligence and evolutionary computation have been cited more than 4,000 times.

Stephen Hawking Says Humans Won't Survive Another 1,000 Years On Earth

Popular Science

By Colin Lecher 

Stephen Hawking Wikimedia Commons

Physicist Stephen Hawking, speaking at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said if humans don't migrate from the planet Earth to colonize other planets, they'll face extinction in 1,000 years. So, phew, we're good, guys. We've got like 900-plus years to just sit on this. That's a relief. [RT]

Lost microcontinent lurking under the sea

By Charles Q. Choi, OurAmazingPlanet Contributor | LiveScience.com

Photo By Torsvik, et al./Nature GeoScience

The remains of a micro-continent scientist call Mauritia might be preserved under huge amounts of ancient lava beneath the Indian Ocean, a new analysis of island sands in the area suggests.

These findings hint that such micro-continents may have occurred more frequently than previously thought, the scientists who conducted the study, detailed online Feb. 24 in the journal Nature Geoscience, say.

Researchers analyzed sands from the isle of Mauritius in the western Indian Ocean. Mauritius is part of a volcanic chain that, strangely, exists far from the edges of its tectonic plate. In contrast, most volcanoes are found at the borders of the tectonic plates that make up the surface of the Earth.

Investigators suggest that volcanic chains in the middle of tectonic plates, such as the Hawaiian Islands, are caused by giant pillars of hot molten rock known as mantle plumes. Theserise up from near the Earth's core, penetrating overlying material like a blowtorch. [What Is Earth Made Of?]

Mantle plumes can apparently trigger continental breakups, softening the tectonic plates from below until they fragment — this is how the lost continent of Eastern Gondwana ended about 170 million years ago, prior research suggests. A plume currently sits near Mauritius and other islands, and the researchers wanted to see if they could find ancient fragments of continents from just such a breakup there.

Digging in the sand

The beach sands of Mauritius are the eroded remnants of volcanic rocks created by eruptions 9 million years ago. Collecting them"was actually quite pleasant," said researcher Ebbe Hartz, a geologistat the University of Oslo in Norway. He described walking out from a tropical beach, "maybe with a Coke and an icebox, and you dig down underwater into sand dunes at low tide."

Within these sands, investigators discovered about 20 ancient zircon grains (a type of mineral) between 660 million and 1,970 million years old. To learn more about the source of this ancient zircon, the scientists investigated satellite maps of Earth's gravity field. The strength of the field depends on Earth's mass, and since the planet's mass is not spread evenly, its gravity field is stronger in some places on the planet's surface and weaker in others.

The researchers discovered Mauritius is part of a contiguous block of abnormally thick crust that extends in an arc northward to the Seychelles islands. The finding suggests Mauritius and the adjacent region overlie an ancient micro-continent they call Mauritia. The ancient zircons they unearthed are shards of lost Mauritia.

The researchers meticulously sought to rule out any chance these ancient grains were contaminants from elsewhere.

"Zircons are heavy minerals, and the uranium and lead elements used to date the ages of these zircons are extraordinarily heavy, so these grains do not easily fly around — they did not blow into Mauritius from a sandstorm in Africa," Hartz told OurAmazingPlanet.

"We also chose a beach where there was no construction whatsoever — that these grains did not come from cement somewhere else," Hartz added. "We were also careful that all the equipment we used to collect the minerals was new, that this was the first time it was used, that there was no previous rock sticking to it from elsewhere."

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El Índice de Felicidad Planetaria de Nic Marks

golem

El estadístico Nic Marks pregunta por qué medimos el éxito de una nación por la productividad, en lugar de hacerlo por la felicidad y el bienestar de su pueblo. Presenta el Índice de Felicidad Planetaria, que indica el bienestar nacional en función del uso de recursos (porque una vida feliz no tiene que costar la Tierra). ¿Qué países están mejor ubicados en el IFP? Tal vez te sorprenda.

An Asteroid Buzzes the Earth

TimeMagazine

'Earth will have 15 minutes to protect electronics'

wnd/ By F. Michael Maloof

WASHINGTON – Scientists around the globe are joining those in the United States in becoming alarmed at the possibility of a plasma cloud from a solar superstorm that could wipe out vast electronics networks, because they say Earth would have only a notice of about 15 minutes.

U.S. space scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrator and the National Aeronautic Space Administration’s Goddard Space Flight Center have been expressing concern over what is fast becoming a “solar storm maximum.”

And the alarms now are going off globally, with expressions of concern from European Union interests, the European Space Agency and Great Britain’s Royal Academy of Engineering, which is urging the British Space Weather Board to help that nation prepare for a massive solar flare.

“Our message is, don’t panic, but do prepare – a solar superstorm will happen one day and we need to be ready for it,” said Professor Paul Cannon who chaired the Academy’s working group.

Given the intensity of the increasing flare spewing from the sun’s surface, experts agree that scientists would have only 15 minutes of warning of an intense solar flare – a huge plasma cloud of charged particles that can become a nightmare to unguarded electronics on earth.

Right now, scientists are relying on an ageing satellite called ACE – Advanced Composition Explorer which provides the 15 minutes heads-up.

The concern has been rising as the sun continues spewing out new, massive flares even as Earth moves closer into alignment with the gigantic sun spots producing those flares.

This increased solar activity is occurring as sun spots multiply on the sun’s surface during what is expected to be its most active period, 2012-2013, in its 11-year cycle.

But scientists are worried the ACE satellite could fail, and replacement, called Discover, isn’t expected to be launched by NASA until 2014.

Europe’s ability to monitor space weather is not comprehensive, so radiation monitors and other devices are being added to as many satellites as possible as scientists seek ways to monitor such threats as closely as possible.

Europe has a number of ground-based measurement systems, including magnetometers, neutron monitors, GPS receivers and ionosondes. Some 20 European countries provide ground-based space weather measurements, with France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom contributing to reports at the European Space Weather Portal website.

According to Michael Hapgood, who heads the Space Environment at STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the United Kingdom, the infrastructure for the European space weather community provides valuable information to the space science and engineering community.

However, it also has a number of weaknesses, he said, in which the programs are fragmented, there is limited awareness among decision-makers who ultimately control budgets, poor quality of programs are offered and some still regard space weather as a part of astronomy.

To Hapgood, there also are threats to developing useful information. Because of fragmentation of the programs, it leads to piecemeal funding cuts. Space weather products also compete with other areas of astronomy and many, he said, view space between the planets as empty and therefore harmless.

Since satellites are integral to the infrastructure of the U.S., space weather data becomes critically important to anticipate anomalies and potential failures of the satellites. It also is the first step in making the satellites more resistant to such space weather events.

Indeed, numerous studies have shown a correlation of satellite anomalies with space weather. Most anomalies have occurred during periods of space storms. For example, anomalies experienced in 2003 occurred during the October 2003 Halloween storms.

Richard Fisher, NASA heliophysicist, warns about the damages that solar flares, CME, EMP can cause to Earth.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/02/earth-will-have-15-minutes-to-protect-electronics/#I3AJpUhozOQQ8gFK.99