Tag: Earth

New York City is sinking — and it’s not just because of the flooding

NeRD

While the ground may feel stable under your feet, it’s always moving ever so slightly — not just horizontally with the movement of tectonic plates, but also vertically. And New York City, in particular, is sinking. (No, it’s not because of all the recent flooding that has seen commuters swimming on the streets of the West Village and cars stuck indefinitely on the Franklin D. Roosevelt highway). Between 2016 and 2023, researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) used a space-based method known as interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) to 3D-map the…

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NASA Announces Launch Services for Pair of Space Weather Satellites

NeRD

NASA logo Credit: NASA NASA has selected SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, and its Falcon 9 rocket to provide the launch service for the agency’s TRACERS (Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites) mission, a pair of small satellites that will study space weather and how the Sun’s energy affects Earth’s magnetic environment, or magnetosphere TRACERS will be an important addition to NASA’s heliophysics fleet and aims to answer long-standing questions critical to understanding the Sun-Earth system. The spinning satellites will study how solar wind, the continuous stream of ionized particles…

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Autumnal equinox 2023 brings fall to the Northern Hemisphere this weekend

NeRD

When is the first day of fall in 2023?  A carefully worded answer is that on Saturday (Sept. 23), at 2:50 a.m. EDT (0650 GMT), autumn begins astronomically in the Northern Hemisphere, and spring starts in the Southern. The sun is currently migrating south, having spent the previous six months shining directly on the northern half of our planet.  So, at the official start time of autumn, the sun would appear directly overhead from a ship in the Laccadive Sea, positioned on the equator, 170 miles (275 kilometers) northeast of…

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