This first video highlights the granulation in the photosphere, and the glow of the chromosphere evident above the photosphere when looking at the edge of the solar disc.

This clip shows a small prominence arching above a small sunspot group that had already rotated out of view.

ScienceDaily (2008-11-05) — According to the international space agencies, “space weather” is the single greatest threat to deep space travel. New research in Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion shows how knowledge gained from the pursuit of nuclear fusion research may reduce the threat to acceptable levels, making humanity’s first mission to Mars a much greater possibility. … > read full article

…and none too soon, apparently, as solar minimum is now behind us. At least according to David Hathaway at Marshall Space Flight Center. The Sun is finally starting to show signs of life once gain after a very long and very quiet solar minimum. You can read more in the article, The Sun Shows Signs of Life, at Science@NASA.

The next image is of the Great Cluster in Hercules, M13. This image is the combination of multiple short exposures co-added to yield a single, more detailed image.

This last image is a mosaic of five images to create a single image of the 1st Quarter Moon. …ok, slightly past 1st Quarter. The image was taken using our blue filter.

Dear Ulysses colleagues,

Well, August came and went and spacecraft operations continue. However, we now have to reduce the telemetry bit rate to 256 bps for low elevation portions of our 70m tracks. As reported in early August, a further X-band switch on attempt failed and we do not feel that approach is worth trying again. We will try a more aggressive switching scenario (involving Main Bus Undervoltage) at the first signs of fuel freezing.

We estimate that we have approximately 0.85 kg fuel remaining but there is an uncertainty of +0.6/-0.7 kg. So with our current rate of fuel usage (~0.5 kg per month), we expect to run out sometime between the end of September and December. We could use less fuel during our 2-hourly fuel bleeding activities, but that would increase the risk of freezing significantly.

Hopefully, we will be able to continue the S-band mission on a day-by-day basis until the fuel freezes or runs out. And with a bit of luck, we’ll encounter the slow speed solar wind before then.

Best regards,
Nigel

The synthetic mixture, containing compounds trimethylamine and nonanal in low doses, is just as enticing to Culex mosquitoes as the current attractants, Leal said, but this one is odorless to humans.

Check out the rest of the story at ScienceDaily.com
No More Big Stink: Scent Lures Mosquitoes, But Humans Can’t Smell It

Now, thanks to the Living With a Star program, there are a multitude of spacecraft out there monitoring and reporting back on the Sun’s activity with more probes on the way. There’s a great article about a few probes from this program that are in the works that will give us even better understanding of solar dynamics and how our star can affect us here on the Earth. Check it out! The article is called Living With A Star and is at the Science@NASA website.

Dear Ulysses friends and colleagues,

As you are aware, the proposed July 1st Ulysses operations end date
has come and gone. And as a result of our fuel bleeding and other
operations strategies, we have managed to avoid freezing the
hydrazine so far!

Now we are continuing operations on a day-to-day basis until the
fuel freezes. That includes fuel bleeding every 2 hours to keep the
hydrazine moving through the pipes and Earth-pointing manoeuvres
interleaved, when required.

When we see the fuel freezing, we will switch off the S-band and
some instruments for a couple of days in an effort to thaw the
hydrazine. After that, we’ll try to switch on the X-band once again
using some more radical (and hence more risky) procedures.

If the fuel has not frozen by the end of July, we’ll try some benign
X-band switching in early August and plan for radical switching in
late August.

What will happen in the unlikely event that we re-establish our
X-band downlink? Well, obviously we’ll leave it on!!! And at the end
of August we should have enough fuel remaining to continue for a
number of months (assuming that we stop the fuel bleeding). The
short portion of pipe that is currently close to freezing will warm
up but other areas of pipework will cool down and they will get
close to freezing during the last quarter of 2008. As for funding
for operations beyond August, that’s another question.

This coming weekend, we will be testing the redundant on-board
receiver which is connected to the front low gain antenna (LGA-F).
This is to validate our ability to command the spacecraft when the
HGA is not pointing towards Earth e.g. if no manoeuvres have been
performed for several days due to frozen fuel.

I know some of the instrument teams have held wakes to celebrate the
fantastic journey that we have been on all these years. However, I
make no apology for the fact that Ulysses is not dead yet. I hope
that in the coming weeks we get to see the transition from fast to
slow solar wind.

Very best regards,
Nigel

All of this reminds me of that scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

The Ulysses Mission was originally conceived as the International Solar Polar Mission, a tandem mission with one spacecraft being built by NASA and the other by ESA. Budget cuts reduced the mission to a single spacecraft jointly engineered by the two agencies. Ulysses was originally to be launched in 1983, but was delayed to the Spring of 1986 and set to deploy from the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle Challenger. As a result of the Challenger accident, its launch was delayed even more. These delays would come back to haunt the mission as the radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) used to power the mission have a fixed lifetime and were constructed and tested in the early 80s. Ulysses was finally launched and deployed from the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle Discovery on October 6th, 1990 and began is trek out to Jupiter and to the Sun’s polar regions.

The primary 6-year mission called for a single solar orbit giving coverage of both the Sun’s southern and northern polar regions at solar minimum and covering radial distances from its perihelion of 1.3 AU to its aphelion of 5.4 AU. Ulysses performed so well that its mission would be extended multiple times allowing it to complete three full orbits. The additional orbits allowed Ulysses to investigate the polar regions during solar maximum, and during our current rise to maximum.

Eventually, the old RTGs became a terminal factor for the spacecraft. With power from the RTGs dwindling, power sharing techniques had to be employed. Various power sharing schemes were developed, but the one that was used allowed all of the science missions to remain active, however it required that the high-bandwidth X-band transmitter be shut down during data collection. Data was to be stored on board for later download. To retrieve data, the science instruments would be shut down and the transmitter restarted. However, the X-band transmitter never came back to life. This was not a stopper for the recovery of science data. The S-band transmitter used for command and telemetry could be used to stream the science data if at a slower rate, but the heat generated by the X-band transmitter was used to help keep the hydrazine fuel lines from freezing. With its power ebbing, its heaters off, and the X-band transmitter broken, Ulysses was destined to freeze and begin to tumble. Once it tumbles and loses lock on the Earth, recovery is impossible. It was determined that July 1st, 2008 would be the day that Ulysses was put to rest.

Since 1999, I’ve been working with the energetic particle data from the MF Spectrum Analyzer (MFSA) of the Heliosphere Instrument for Spectra, Composition and Anisotropies at Low Energy (HISCALE). Here the term “low energy” is relative. The HISCALE instrument measured protons and ions with energies from around 50 keV/nuc to upwards of 20 MeV/nuc and electrons from about 40 to 400 keV. The MFSA worked within the energy range of 50 to 5000 keV/nuc for protons, but provided a higher degree of energy resolution than anything else out there. Even though the spacecraft is now silent and adrift, we still have one and a half solar cycles worth of high-quality data that can yield a LOT of science.

Our immediate project at Fundamental Technologies is to organize and describe the data we have in such a way that it can be easily shared through the Virtual Heliospheric Observatory. If you’d like to use the HISCALE data or are just curious as to what we do at FunTech, browse over to http://ulysses.ftecs.com/ where I keep a blog on the current state of a few of our projects.