{"id":52277,"date":"2012-01-23T13:44:38","date_gmt":"2012-01-23T18:44:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=52277"},"modified":"2012-01-23T18:02:48","modified_gmt":"2012-01-23T23:02:48","slug":"space-weather-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/astronomy\/space-weather-update\/","title":{"rendered":"Space Weather Update"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve heard from a couple people now who have had Mercury retrograde-like events (computer crashing, for instance) and wondered if Mars Rx was playing mimic. I’m not sure about that, but we are<\/em> experiencing some strong solar flares — and Mars is in the line of fire:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Today's extreme ultraviolet solar flare. Image captured by NASA.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

“Analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab say the leading edge of the CME [coronal mass ejection — a plume of plasma jetting out from the Sun] will reach Earth on Jan. 24 at 14:18UT (+\/- 7 hours). Their animated forecast track shows that Mars is in the line of fire, too; the CME will hit the Red Planet during the late hours of Jan. 25.<\/p>\n

“This is a relatively substantial and fast-moving (2200 km\/s) CME. Spacecraft in geosynchronous, polar and other orbits passing through Earth’s ring current and auroral regions could be affected by the cloud’s arrival. In addition, strong geomagnetic storms are possible, so high-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras.”<\/p>\n

And yes, there was a big event this morning:<\/p>\n

“This morning, Jan. 23rd around 0359 UT, big sunspot 1402 erupted, producing a long-duration M9-class solar flare. The explosion’s M9-ranking puts it on the threshold of being an X-flare, the most powerful kind. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured the flare’s extreme ultraviolet flash.” <\/p>\n

Visit Spaceweather.com<\/a> for more info and a brief video showing the flare. <\/p>\n

Alert sent in by Carol Van Strum.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve heard from a couple people now who have had Mercury retrograde-like events (computer crashing, for instance) and wondered if Mars Rx was playing mimic. I’m not sure about that, but we are experiencing some strong solar flares — and Mars is in the line of fire: “Analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab say … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":191,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[119],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52277"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/191"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52277\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}