Plus a “Goodbye” to Ulysses
Greenbelt MD, USA — EIT (Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope) images the solar atmosphere at several wavelengths, and therefore, shows solar material at different temperatures. (Source: http://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/eit/)

In the images taken at 304 Angstroms (example shown here) the bright material is at 60,000 to 80,000 Kelvin. (Image courtesy NASA)

In other images such as those those taken at 171 Angstroms, at 1 million Kelvin. 195 Angstrom images correspond to about 1.5 million Kelvin, 284 Angstrom to 2 million degrees. continue reading »

To measure small temperature variations on the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope in Chile
{Image credit: LSST Corporation}
Gainesville FL, USA — GEC Instruments has been awarded a contract from LSST Corporation in Tucson, Arizona, to build four ultra high accuracy, high resolution temperature measurement instruments, each with 94 thermocouple input channels, accompanied by software for display, plotting, logging, and retrieval of temperature data.

This instrumentation will be used to measure small temperature variations over the range -5 °C to 25 °C on the 27 foot diameter primary/tertiary mirror for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (www.lsst.org), a ground-based facility that will be located atop Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes.

The LSST system will combine a wide field of view, rapid scans of the sky, and deep-imaging capability to map billions of objects and monitor changes in brightness and position.
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International Post Corporation Leads Industry Response to Carbon Emissions
(CSRwire) BELGIUM, – June 2, 2008 – The International Post Corporation (IPC) has launched an environmental measurement and monitoring system providing a common carbon measurement and reporting framework for the global postal industry.

The launch and formal adoption by IPC member postal operators including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK, took place at IPC’s Annual Conference 2008 in La Chapelle en Serval, France on 30 May.

The event was attended by CEOs from Europe, the Asia-Pacific and North America.

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Univ. of California scientists measure heat flow from Earth’s molten core into the lower mantle

{Image by Edward Garnero}
Santa Cruz CA, USA — For the first time, scientists have directly measured the amount of heat flowing from the molten metal of Earth’s core into a region at the base of the mantle, a process that helps drive both the movement of tectonic plates at the surface and the geodynamo in the core that generates Earth’s magnetic field.

Seismologists detected a lens-shaped structure (blue, in the image above) within a large pile of chemically distinct material at the boundary between the liquid outer core and the solid mantle, half-way to the center of the Earth. The tubes rising from the edges of the pile represent plumes of hot mantle material rising toward the surface.

The core-mantle boundary is the curved orange surface, and the small red ball is the solid inner core.

The boundary between the core and the mantle lies half-way to the center of the Earth, at a depth of 1,740 miles (2,900 kilometers). Seismologists are able to probe the structure of this region by studying its effects on seismic waves generated by earthquakes.
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Credits: ESA/INAF-IASF, Rome, Italy, and Observatoire de Paris, France
This false-colour composite, built with images taken by the Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer (VIRTIS) onboard Venus Express, the first-ever images of the hothouse planet’s south pole from a distance of 206 452 kilometres. . ESA’s Venus Express has showed surprisingly clear structures and unexpected detail. The images were taken 12 April during the spacecraft’s initial capture orbit after successful arrival on 11 April 2006.

Engineers have lost no time in switching on several of the instruments and then the VMC (Venus Monitoring Camera) and VIRTIS (Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer) imaged, for the first time in space history, the southern hemisphere of Venus as the spacecraft passed below the planet in an elliptical arc.
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