Solar Wind

After prospecting for 850 days in a gravity hole nearly a million miles from Earth, the Genesis spacecraft is scheduled to return home today and drop off a unique cargo that may contain new clues about the creation of the sun and planets. The payload, enclosed in a capsule to be snatched in mid-air by helicopter over Utah's salt flats, will weigh only one hundred thousandth of an ounce. But it will contain a billion billion atoms that originated from the surface of the sun and represent the original building blocks that formed the solar system some 4.5 billion years ago. Scientists have a good idea of how the solar system came into being: A giant cloud of gas and dust collapsed under its own gravity into a spinning pancake-shaped disc.

Your recent commentary on climate change continues the politically correct approach to the problem of global warming and its solutions without approaching the reality of what has been accomplished and what the underlying issues are ("Forecast calls for pain," Feb. 6). Carbon dioxide production cannot be measured; it can be calculated by analyzing components in effluent streams from boilers and actual feed streams of fuel, which vary in composition, boiler efficiency, excess air and an infinite number of other variables.

Except for a huge wave of media attention, the Great Solar Storm of April 1997 has apparently failed to make landfall.Solar weather watchers had their eyes and orbiting instruments peeled yesterday, looking for signs that the blast of magnetic energy that erupted from the sun Monday morning had swept over Earth.But there was little to see."We have not had any kind of major geophysical response yet," said Dr. Donald J. Michels, head of the coronal physics section at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington.

I leave the water running while I do the dishes, drive a half-ton truck that gets 10 miles to the gallon and, in the energy hog display that my husband finds most annoying, I move from room to room without turning off lights behind me. OK, so I also don't pull out the plugs every day on my appliances not currently in use. This prelude to an Act of Contrition, while by no means complete, was inspired by recent reminders of the terrible cost...

NASA's Voyager I spacecraft, launched in 1977, has become the first spacecraft to cross into the outermost regions of the solar system before entering interstellar space. Voyager I's instruments measured new radio waves and an increase in the strength of beams of energized particles, which nearly reversed direction, on Dec. 17 as the spacecraft was about 8.72 billion miles from the sun, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement. The evidence shows the spacecraft has crossed into a new region of the solar system before the sun's influence begins to fade and interstellar space begins, said Edward Stone of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Physicist Rob Decker is obsessed with a region of space that has an ominous name: the termination shock. It's out there, at the very edge of the solar system, 90 times as far away as Earth is from the sun. It is the region where solar wind comes to a halt. There you will find huge, constant collisions as solar wind - the waves of hydrogen and helium plasma that shoot out from the sun at 1 million mph - crashes into a dense haze of charged particles flowing through interstellar space. Decker and his team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Laurel used an instrument aboard the venerable Voyager 2 spacecraft this month to give astronomers the first detailed look at that smashup - in a region long shrouded in scientific mystery.

Ralph McNutt thinks he may have heard some tiny pieces of the sun ricochet off the walls of the solar system -- composed of the sun, the planets and the thin soup of protons called the solar wind. That noise, Dr. McNutt says, is the first direct evidence that the walls are there.The physicist with Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory is part of a team of scientists analyzing data being gathered by the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft. Both flew past the outer planets a decade ago and are headed into the vast cold space among the stars.

The sun, in a periodic show of its force, is shooting off powerful solar flares that disrupt the Earth's magnetic force and could cause power shortages in the Northern United States over the next week and spark a display of the northern lights visible as far south as Maryland.This is a sun storm, and government scientists monitoring it in Boulder, Colo., have classified it as "severe," the category designating the highest degree of force.The last severe solar storm, in March 1989, caused power blackouts in northern New York and Canada.

Scientists have detected the first signs that Voyager 1, the most far-flung robotic explorer in NASA's fleet, has reached the fringes of the solar system and is closing on a milestone: becoming the first manmade object to breach interstellar space. A team led by Johns Hopkins University scientists reports today in the journal Nature that unusual measurements recorded in recent months indicate that the 26-year-old probe has arrived at a turbulent, little-understood boundary near the rim of the solar system.

You probably have more computing power in your pocket than what NASA's venerable Voyager spacecraft are carrying to the edge of the solar system. They have working memories a million times smaller than your home computer. They record their scientific data on 8-track tape machines. And they communicate with their aging human inventors back home with a 23-watt whisper. Even so, the twin explorers, now 33 years into their mission, continue to explore new territory as far as 11 billion miles from Earth.

You probably have more computing power in your pocket than what NASA's venerable Voyager spacecraft are carrying to the edge of the solar system. They have working memories a million times smaller than your home computer. They record their scientific data on 8-track tape machines. And they communicate with their aging human inventors back home with a 23-watt whisper. Even so, the twin explorers, now 33 years into their mission, continue to explore new territory as far as 11 billion miles from Earth.

Dozens of area residents and business people filed into the Maryland State Fairgrounds in Timonium Friday for the first day of the Solar & Wind Expo to see how much it would cost to install solar panels or wind turbines — and how much that would cut utility bills. The expo brings together companies that offer all kinds of renewable energy for home or office, sponsors said. They, the vendors and state officials on hand said there was a real demand for such products now that government incentives and declining prices are making the switch more affordable.

Gov. Martin O'Malley will push legislators to pass a package of renewable energy initiatives that would boost solar production, make the state more attractive for offshore wind development and offer incentives for purchasing electric cars. The proposals, which O'Malley detailed in an interview Tuesday on the eve of the General Assembly's 90-day legislative session, are designed to put Maryland on course to generate 20 percent of its electricity via renewable sources in about a decade.

Physicist Rob Decker is obsessed with a region of space that has an ominous name: the termination shock. It's out there, at the very edge of the solar system, 90 times as far away as Earth is from the sun. It is the region where solar wind comes to a halt. There you will find huge, constant collisions as solar wind - the waves of hydrogen and helium plasma that shoot out from the sun at 1 million mph - crashes into a dense haze of charged particles flowing through interstellar space. Decker and his team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Laurel used an instrument aboard the venerable Voyager 2 spacecraft this month to give astronomers the first detailed look at that smashup - in a region long shrouded in scientific mystery.

NASA's $212 million Stardust mission has been gathering dust in space for nearly seven years, and scientists will be up early Sunday in Utah to watch what they hope will be its safe return. Stardust carries a precious scientific cargo -- less than a tenth of an ounce of comet dust, and specks of stardust from interstellar space. They believe this bantam freight will yield the first direct evidence for the chemical makeup of a comet, as well as clues to the materials and conditions that prevailed when the solar system formed more than 4.5 billion years ago. A soft landing would also help NASA get past memories of the day in 2004 when another robot spacecraft brought samples back, only to blast a 15-inch crater in the desert floor when its parachutes failed to open.

NASA's Voyager I spacecraft, launched in 1977, has become the first spacecraft to cross into the outermost regions of the solar system before entering interstellar space. Voyager I's instruments measured new radio waves and an increase in the strength of beams of energized particles, which nearly reversed direction, on Dec. 17 as the spacecraft was about 8.72 billion miles from the sun, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement. The evidence shows the spacecraft has crossed into a new region of the solar system before the sun's influence begins to fade and interstellar space begins, said Edward Stone of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

NASA's Genesis space capsule crashed in the Utah desert last month because a critical piece of equipment that was supposed to trigger the release of two parachutes was apparently installed backward, NASA officials say. The finding, if verified, would be a blow to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and its major contractor on the $264 million Genesis mission, Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin Corp., which was also involved in the 1999 loss of NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter because of a mix-up between English and metric units.

Tonight's forecast calls for fair skies and continued cool, with a chance of geo-magnetic storms.Government scientists say the eruptions of three huge flares on the surface of the sun since last Saturday have sent blasts of high-energy particles toward Earth.These solar wind "gusts" have caused auroras, or Northern Lights displays as far south as Philadelphia, and threaten to briefly disrupt electrical service, navigation gear and shortwave radio signals.Energy from the most recent flare, on Wednesday night, should reach Earth by tonight, scientists say.So far, little more than auroras have been reported.

NASA's Genesis space capsule crashed in the Utah desert last month because a critical piece of equipment that was supposed to trigger the release of two parachutes was apparently installed backward, NASA officials say. The finding, if verified, would be a blow to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and its major contractor on the $264 million Genesis mission, Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin Corp., which was also involved in the 1999 loss of NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter because of a mix-up between English and metric units.