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November 04, 2013

NASA Begins Airborne Campaign To Map Greenland Ice Sheet Summer Melt

Researchers Will Measure Ice Elevation, Mass From C130 Aircraft

For the first time, a NASA airborne campaign will measure changes in the height of the Greenland Ice Sheet and surrounding Arctic sea ice produced by a single season of summer melt. NASA's C-130 research aircraft flew from the Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, VA, to Greenland Wednesday where they will conduct survey flights to collect data that will improve our understanding of seasonal melt and provide baseline measurements for future satellite missions.

Boomerang Nebula Structure 'Expanding Rapidly Into Space'

At a cosmologically crisp one degree Kelvin (minus 458 degrees Fahrenheit), the Boomerang nebula is the coldest known object in the universe -- colder, in fact, than the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, the explosive event that created the cosmos. Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile have taken a new look at this object to learn more about its frigid properties and to determine its true shape, which has an eerily ghost-like appearance.