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SUBORBITAL CHICKEN: On Wednesday Sept. 5th a group of California high school students celebrated the 35th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 1 in an unusual way: They launched a rubber chicken. The popular NASA mascot Camilla traveled to the top of our planet's atmosphere on board a suborbital helium balloon. Here is a snapshot from an altitude of approximately 120,000 feet:
Camilla is wearing headphones. Why? Because she's listening to the Golden iPod, the modern-day successor to the Golden Records bolted to the side of the Voyager probes. The students are updating the Golden Records with 21st-century content that the students would like to send into the cosmos. This was just a test flight; in 2013, they hope to launch the Golden iPod into Earth orbit onboard a CubeSat they are building.
At the apex of the Sept. 5th suborbital flight, the helium balloon popped as planned and Camilla parachuted back to Earth. The students, who call their group "Earth to Sky," recovered Camilla and the Golden iPod from a remote landing site in the Nevada wilderness on Sept. 6th. Now they are all enjoying music that has been to the doorstep of space itself.
More information about the flight and the recovery expedition may be found at Earth to Sky's Facebook page. Students who wish to participate in the Golden iPod project can submit their ideas for the iPod's playlist at goldenipod.org.
SDO ECLIPSE SEASON: Twice every year, around the time of the equinoxes, Earth can pass directly between the Sun and NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), producing a series of beautiful eclipses from the point of view of the spacecraft. SDO's autumnal eclipse season began yesterday, Sept. 6th, with a partial blackout of the sun:
During the eclipse, which was centered around 0700 UT, Earth covered about half of the sun. Because these eclipses typically last only a few minutes, there is still plenty of time remaining in the day for SDO to monitor activity on the sun. The observatory won't miss much even with Earth occasionally getting in the way. The ongoing eclipse season will end on Sept. 26th. Between now and then, stay tuned for some rare blackouts.
MAGNETIC UNREST: Earth's magnetic field is still reverberating from a pair of CME impacts--a relatively strong blow on Sept 3rd followed by a lesser hit on Sept. 4th. The double strike ignited auroras around the Arctic Circle that are only slowly fading. Olivier Du Tré photographed this apparition over Red Deer, Alberta, on Sept. 5th:
"For the second night this week, the Northern Lights put on an awesome show over Alberta," says Du Tré. "At one point about 65%-70% of the sky above the farmlands to the NE of Calgary were lit up. It was incredible."
NOAA forecasters estimate a 25% chance of strong polar geomagnetic storms on Sept. 6th as the reverberations continue. Aurora alerts: text, phone.
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