Quantifying Changes in the Land Over Time: A Landsat Classroom Activity

Students in grades 7-10 analyze land cover change in order to help them grasp the extent, significance, and consequences of land cover change; and to introduce them to the perspective of space-based observations. Educational levels: High school, Middle school

NuSTAR discovery of a cyclotron line in KS 1947+300

We present a spectral analysis of three simultaneous Nuclear Spectroscopy Telescope Array and Swift/XRT observations of the transient Be-neutron star binary KS 1947+300 taken during its outburst in 2013/2014. These broadband observations were supported by Swift/XRT monitoring snapshots every three days, which we use to study the evolution of the spectrum over the outburst. We find strong changes of the power-law photon index, which shows a weak trend of softening with increasing X-ray flux. The neutron star shows very strong pulsations with a period of P ≈ 18.8 s. The 0.8–79 keV broadband spectrum can be described by a power law with an exponential cutoff and a blackbody component at low energies. During the second observation we detect a cyclotron resonant scattering feature at 12.5 keV, which is absent in the phase-averaged spectra of observations 1 and 3. Pulse phase-resolved spectroscopy reveals that the strength of the feature changes strongly with pulse phase and is most prominent during the broad minimum of the pulse profile. At the same phases the line also becomes visible in the first and third observation at the same energy. This discovery implies that KS 1947+300 has a magnetic field strength of B ≈ 1.1 × 10^(12) (1 + z) G, which is at the lower end of known cyclotron line sources

An Agent Community Supporting Orbit Determination

Abstract During the past year we have been engaged in an effort to develop a prototype community of fine-grained agents to support the orbit determination process for the SOHO [1] mission. This paper presents a high-level overview of what was accomplished

The Dynamic Earth: NASA Observes Our Ever-Changing Planet

This DVD provides an 18-minute introduction to how NASA is observing our ever-changing planet. On the The Dynamic Earth DVD Web page you can download the video as an iPod or iPhone version, as well as an AppleTV/Full resolution version, and access a glossary and links to related Web sites. Educational levels: General public

Solar-induced fluorescence noise reduction using simulated and real data

<p>Tarballs that contains software and datasets to reproduce noise reduction algorithm with simulated data and with real GOME-2 solar-induced fluorescence retrievals.</p&gt