Tag: GPS (page 1 of 3)

Your Smartphone Usage is Linked to Your Level of Depression

July 16, 2015 / / 0 Comments

April McCarthy, Prevent DiseaseYou can fake a smile, but your phone knows the truth. Depression can be detected from your smartphone sensor data by tracking the number of minutes you use the phone and your daily geographical locations, reports a Northwestern Medicine study.More and more smartphones are able to see what many of us cannot.The ongoing use of this communications technology, as compared to computer-based use such as email, is linked to increased psychological di [...]

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The sun unleashes its biggest flare of the year

May 7, 2015 / / 0 Comments




Excerpt from dailytimes.com.pk

The sun has unleashed its most powerful flare of the year causing radio blackouts throughout the Pacific region.

The enormous X-class solar flare peaked at 6:11pm ET yesterday from a sunspot called Active Region 2339 (AR2339).

Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation that, when intense enough, can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel - and scientists say they could get more powerful in the future.

This latest flare is classified as an X2.7. X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength.

Despite the recent radio blackouts, scientists say the flare is unlikely to cause any further major issues here on Earth.

‘Given the impulsive nature of this event, as well as the source location on the eastern limb of the sun, we are not expecting a radiation storm at Earth,’ scientists with the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) in Boulder, Colorado.

‘We will be on the lookout for new imagery from the Nasa Soho [Solar and Heliospheric Observatory] mission to determine if there was an associated coronal mass ejection (CME) with this event,’ they added.

‘Given the same logic above, however, we do not expect there to be one that would impact Earth.’

Yesterday Kazunari Shibata, an astrophysicist from Kyoto University in Japan, said the sun has the potential to unleash a flare of such a magnitude that it would be larger than anything humans have ever seen.

At the Space Weather Workshop in Colorado, Shibata said ‘superflares,’ that contain energy 1,000 times larger than what we have seen could be on their way.

He said there is evidence of this happening every 800 to 5,000 years on Earth,

Scientists say such a solar ‘super-storm’ would pose a ‘catastrophic’ and ‘long-lasting’ threat to life on Earth.

A superflare would induce huge surges of electrical currents in the ground and in overhead transmission lines, causing widespread power outages and severely damaging critical electrical components.

The largest ever solar super-storm on record occurred in 1859 and is known as the Carrington Event, named after the English astronomer Richard Carrington who spotted the preceding solar flare.

This massive CME released about 1022 kJ of energy - the equivalent to 10 billion Hiroshima bombs exploding at the same time - and hurled around a trillion kilos of charged particles towards the Earth at speeds of up to 3000 km/s.

However, its impact on the human population was relatively benign as our electronic infrastructure at the time amounted to no more than about 124,000 miles (200,000 km) of telegraph lines.

Nasa has also released incredible footage showing the sun unleashing a huge lick of plasma that increased the star’s visible hemisphere by almost half.

The solar filament, which exploded on April 28 and 29, was suspended above the sun due to strong magnetic fields that pushed outwards.

Solar astronomers around the world had their eyes on this unusually large filament and kept track as it erupted.

Nasa’s animation involves images taken from the orbiting Solar and Heliospheric Observatory using its Large Angle Spectrometric Coronagraph.

The diameter of the animation is about 30 million miles (45 million km) at the distance of the sun, or half of the diameter of the orbit of Mercury.

The white circle in the centre of the round disk represents the size of the sun, which is being blocked by the telescope in order to see the fainter material around it.

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Powerful solar storm sparks stunning aurora around the world ~ Images of the Northern Lights 2015

March 18, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Excerpt from cnn.com  A severe solar storm created a stunning display of light in the night sky over parts of the United States, Europe, Australia and New Zealand early Wednesday morning, spotted by those lucky enough to be awake in the wee h...

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Rare & severe geomagnetic storm enables Aurora Borealis to be seen from U.S. tonight

March 17, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Excerpt from mashable.com Thanks to a rare, severe geomagnetic storm, the Northern Lights may be visible on Tuesday night in areas far to the south of its typical home in the Arctic.  The northern tier of the U.S., from Washington State to Michiga...

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Billionaire teams up with NASA to mine the moon

March 10, 2015 / / 0 Comments




Excerpt from cnbc.com
By Susan Caminiti



Moon Express, a Mountain View, California-based company that's aiming to send the first commercial robotic spacecraft to the moon next year, just took another step closer toward that lofty goal. 

Earlier this year, it became the first company to successfully test a prototype of a lunar lander at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The success of this test—and a series of others that will take place later this year—paves the way for Moon Express to send its lander to the moon in 2016, said company co-founder and chairman Naveen Jain.

Moon Express conducted its tests with the support of NASA engineers, who are sharing with the company their deep well of lunar know-how. The NASA lunar initiative—known as Catalyst—is designed to spur new commercial U.S. capabilities to reach the moon and tap into its considerable resources.In addition to Moon Express, NASA is also working with Astrobotic Technologies of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Masten Space Systems of Mojave, California, to develop commercial robotic spacecrafts. 

Jain said Moon Express also recently signed an agreement to take over Space Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral. The historic launchpad will be used for Moon Express's lander development and flight-test operations. Before it was decommissioned, the launchpad was home to NASA's Atlas-Centaur rocket program and its Surveyor moon landers.

"Clearly, NASA has an amazing amount of expertise when it comes to getting to the moon, and it wants to pass that knowledge on to a company like ours that has the best chance of being successful," said Jain, a serial entrepreneur who also founded Internet companies Infospace and Intelius. He believes that the moon holds precious metals and rare minerals that can be brought back to help address Earth's energy, health and resource challenges. 

Among the moon's vast riches: gold, cobalt, iron, palladium, platinum, tungsten and Helium-3, a gas that can be used in future fusion reactors to provide nuclear power without radioactive waste. "We went to the moon 50 years ago, yet today we have more computing power with our iPhones than the computers that sent men into space," Jain said. "That type of exponential technological growth is allowing things to happen that was never possible before."

An eye on the Google prize

Source: MoonExpress

Helping to drive this newfound interest in privately funded space exploration is the Google Lunar X Prize. It's a competition organized by the X Prize Foundation and sponsored by Google that will award $30 million to the first company that lands a commercial spacecraft on the moon, travels 500 meters across its surface and sends high-definition images and video back to Earth—all before the end of 2016.

Moon Express is already at the front of the pack. In January it was awarded a $1 million milestone prize from Google for being the only company in the competition so far to test a prototype of its lander. "Winning the X prize would be a great thing," said Jain. "But building a great company is the ultimate goal with us." When it comes to space exploration, he added, "it's clear that the baton has been passed from the government to the private sector."

Testing in stages

Jain said Moon Express has been putting its lunar lander through a series of tests at the space center. The successful outing earlier this year involved tethering the vehicle—which is the size of a coffee table—to a crane in order to safely test its control systems. "The reason we tethered it to the crane is because the last thing we wanted was the aircraft to go completely haywire and hurt someone," he said. 

At the end of March, the company will conduct a completely free flight test with no tethering. The lander will take off from the pad, go up and sideways, then land back at the launchpad. "This is to test that the vehicle knows where to go and how to get back to the launchpad safely," Jain explained.


Once all these tests are successfully completed, Jain said the lander—called MX-1—will be ready to travel to the moon. The most likely scenario is that it will be attached to a satellite that will take the lander into a low orbit over the Earth. From there the MX-1 will fire its own rocket, powered by hydrogen peroxide, and launch from that orbit to complete its travel to the moon's surface. 

The lander's first mission is a one-way trip, meaning that it's not designed to travel back to the Earth, said Jain. "The purpose is to show that for the first time, a company has developed the technology to land softly on the moon," he said. "Landing on the moon is not the hard part. Landing softly is the hard part." 

That's because even though the gravity of the moon is one-sixth that of the Earth's, the lander will still be traveling down to the surface of the moon "like a bullet," Jain explained. Without the right calculations to indicate when its rockets have to fire in order to slow it down, the lander would hit the surface of the moon and break into millions of pieces. "Unlike here on Earth, there's no GPS on the moon to tell us this, so we have to do all these calculations first," he said. 

Looking ahead 15 or 20 years, Jain said he envisions a day when the moon is used as a sort of way station enabling easier travel for exploration to other planets. In the meantime, he said the lander's second and third missions could likely involve bringing precious metals, minerals and even moon rocks back to Earth. "Today, people look at diamonds as this rare thing on Earth," Jain said.
He added, "Imagine telling someone you love her by giving her the moon."

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Recent Disappearances & Strangeness in the Bermuda Triangle

March 1, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Excerpt from paranormal.lovetoknow.com By Michelle Radcliff The Bermuda Triangle is an area of mostly open ocean located between Bermuda, Miami, Florida and San Juan, Puerto Rico. The unexplained disappearances of hundreds of ships and air...

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NASA To Study Mysterious ‘Magnetic Explosions’ Between Earth, Sun That Unleash Dangerous X-Rays By Brandon Mercer

February 24, 2015 / / 0 Comments


(NASA)



Excerpt from sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com

NASA AMES RESEARCH CENTER (CBS SF) — Earth and the Sun may be 93 million miles apart, but cosmic explosions between the two celestial spheres occur often and with devastating effects–unleashing waves of X-ray radiation and disrupting GPS communications, and it is with this danger in mind that next month, NASA will launch four “Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission” satellites, studying these “magnetic reconnections” and better predicting the consequences of these cosmic phenomena.

NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View uses supercomputers to create theoretical models of the magnetic fields on the sun, but the new mission will be able to actually observe what is happening, from a lofty vantage point `far above the Earth’s pole.




The mysterious magnetic reconnections actually transfer energy and physical particles from the Sun to Earth. The forces at work can accelerate particles to nearly the speed of light, with devastating consequences.

In October 2003, a massive release of X-ray radiation hit Earth in what became known as the Halloween Storms. The energy triggered the first ever radiation warning to aircraft, alerting pilots that high altitude flights could expose passengers and crew to unhealthy levels of radiation.

Simultaneously, the GPS location system was impacted. Back then, this wasn’t as great a concern for the general public. It mainly affected the military, pilots, and sea captains, but were the same event to occur today, it may be much more noticeable with today’s smartphone world where everything we do is geo-tagged and coordinated using the GPS signals. In the future, it could evven impact autonomous self-driving vehicles and airborne drones that rely on GPS.

Karen C. Fox from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland writes, “Understanding vast systems in space requires understanding what’s happening on widely different scales. Giant events can turn out to have tiny drivers — take, for example, what rocked near-Earth space in October 2003.”
The Halloween geomagnetic storms had a beautiful side too. The Northern Lights were visible clear down to Southern California, and even Texas.

The Magnetospheric Multiscale, or MMS, mission will be the first ever mission dedicated to studying this universal process by orbiting Earth, and passing directly through nearby magnetic reconnection regions.

“Armed with this data, scientists will have their first chance to watch magnetic reconnection from the inside, right as it’s occurring. By focusing on the small-scale process, scientists open the door to understanding what happens on larger scales throughout the universe,” wrote Fox. 

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Elusive dark matter may be detected with GPS satellites

November 18, 2014 / / 0 Comments


This two-clocks-illustration shows the pattern of how two atomic clocks would desynchronize and then resynchronize due to a lump of dark matter sweeping through a Global Positioning System or other atomic clock based network. Photo courtesy of Andrei Derevianko, University of Nevada, Reno.


Excerpt from
sciencerecorder.com


Global Positioning System, or GPS for short, devices are typically used for navigation purposes. But this satellite network could also alert us to something else: the presence of dark matter.

Dark matter is thought to form 80% of the universe, but is difficult to detect because it rarely interacts with ordinary matter. Its makeup is unknown, as it has never been viewed by science. Some have suggested that dark matter is a particle; however, a new study indicates that dark matter may consist of kinks in the quantum field.

According to Andrei Derevianko at the University of Nevada, Reno, and Maxim Pospelov at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, dark matter may be made of quantum field cracks that can be detected by GPS. The theory is a revolutionary one, and would change the nature of time and space where the kinds are located.

One of these elements is time, which is tracked by the extremely accurate GPS system. With a network of satellites spanning 50,000 kilometers and traveling through space at 300 kilometers a second, a cosmic kink could disturb the GPS clocks. This quantum crack would require 170 seconds to jump across the networks.

GPS clocks could be interrupted by other factors, but Deverianko and Pospelov believe that only dark matter could disturb the system’s timekeeping in a certain way.

Derevianko is currently pulling data from 15 years of GPS records to search for signs of dark matter’s presence. If no fingerprints are detected, he will use the ground-based atomic clocks belonging to the Network for European Accurate Time and Frequency Transfer.
If dark matter is nothing more than cosmic kinks, it could give some people a new thing to grumble about. “I hear these stories about people getting lost using GPS,” said Derevianko. “Now they could have another excuse: maybe it was dark matter that caused them to lose their way.”

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Double blast of solar storms heading to Earth raise disruption concerns

September 17, 2014 / / 0 Comments



reuters.com
By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL Fla. (Reuters) - A rare double burst of magnetically charged solar storms will hit Earth Thursday night and Friday, raising concerns that GPS signals, radio communications and power transmissions could be disrupted, officials said on Thursday.
Individually, the storms, known as coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, wouldn’t warrant special warnings, but their unusual close timing and direct path toward Earth spurred the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center to issue an alert.
The first CME, which burst from a magnetically disturbed region of the sun on Monday night, should reach Earth Thursday night, center director Thomas Berger told reporters on a conference call.
The same patch of solar real estate produced a second, more powerful storm about 1:45 p.m. EDT on Wednesday.“We don’t expect any unmanageable impacts to national infrastructure from these solar events at this time, but we are watching these events closely,” Berger said.
The sun currently is in the peak of its 11-year cycle, though the overall level of activity is far lower than a typical solar max.
Storms as powerful as the ones now making their way toward Earth typically occur 100 to 200 times during a solar cycle, Berger said.
“The unique thing about this event is that we’ve had two in close succession and the CMEs could possibly be interacting on their way to Earth, at the Earth’s orbit or beyond. We just don’t know that yet,” he said.
The highly energetic, magnetically charged solar particles could hit Earth’s magnetic field and disrupt some radio communications and degrade GPS signals, NOAA said.
The storms also have the potential to impact electric field power grids in the northern latitudes, which are more susceptible to geomagnetic disturbances.
Power grid operators and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have been notified “just in case,” Berger added.
On the plus side, the storms should trigger beautiful auroral displays, visible wherever clear skies prevail along the northern tier of the United States. Aurora are caused by electrically charged solar particles hitting oxygen, nitrogen and other gases high in the atmosphere, creating curtains of light above the planet’s magnetic north and south poles.

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How Much Are You Willing to Know

March 15, 2012 / / 0 Comments

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a message from Lisa Renee

Wednesday, 7 March, 2012  (posted 14 March, 2012)

Dear Family,

Those of us that have been clarifying our new identity as we move into the next stage of our emergence into the world, are sta...

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MA’AT about Love, Balance & Spiritual Communication

March 8, 2012 / / 0 Comments

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7 March 2012 Channeler: Susan Elsa

MA’AT Dear beloved Souls on Planet Earth

I AM MA’AT, and I come to teach you for 2012 and after, about Balance, balanced Spiritual Communication and Love. Balance, is probably...

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old teachings with a new twist!

February 25, 2012 / / 0 Comments

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23 February 2012

So I thought I would bring up a topic I have no recollection of seeing any information about anywhere, ever, and that is channeling yourself into devices like computers or iphones (I will NEVER own one ...

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Luxury-Sea Boat Generates Electricity from Ocean Water

December 19, 2011 / / 0 Comments

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A company named Luxury-Sea is building a boat with a special device that is claimed to generate electricity from ocean water, to both produce hydrogen to fuel its engine as well as power its on-board electronics. 

...

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