Qbserve vs timing plus#

At dawn, your location on the Earth’s surface is pointed straight in the direction of the Earth’s travel in its orbit.

Starting around midnight your location on the Earth’s surface spins around to the forward-facing half of Earth, relative to the direction that the Earth is travelling in its orbit around the Sun. Why isn’t it as good as soon as it becomes dark? - SteveĪnswer: The main reason that the best viewing times are between midnight and dawn is due to the orientation between your location on the Earth’s surface and the direction of travel of the Earth in its orbit. Scientists analyze details about the particles' mass and energy, as well as the area they came from and the time they were collected, and they use these details to map the boundary of our solar system.Question: Why are all the best times for viewing meteor showers between midnight and dawn? As I imagine looking down on the solar system from above, I think of a stream of comet debris as impacting all of our outward-facing atmosphere (away from the sun) uniformly at the same time. These instruments collect particles that travel toward our planet from out beyond Pluto. It has instruments similar to telescopes that are pointed toward the edge of our solar system. NASA's IBEX spacecraft was launched in 2008, and the small satellite is roughly the size of a bus tire. The findings about the solar system's tail were published in the July 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal. 'The length of the tail is one of the things we don't measure particularly well,' he said, noting that the measurements are taken from inside the heliosphere looking out.īut McComas says scientists can make calculations based on the particles they observe, and they think the heliotail trails off and evaporates over a distance of possibly 160 billion kilometers. Solar wind travels faster when it comes from the sun's poles, and slower when it comes from the equator, and scientists attribute the tail's shape to the combination of slow and fast moving particles.ĭavid McComas, an assistant vice president for space science and engineering at the Southwest Research Institute in Texas, is the IBEX principal investigator. Scientists say the tail resembles a four-leaf clover, shaped by solar wind, the material that speeds away from the sun.

Qbserve vs timing plus#

'We know that the Sun is moving relative to interstellar gas, and so we presumed there was a tail, but this is actually the first real data that we have that gives us the shape of the tail,' he said in a NASA-organized Google Plus Hangout Wednesday. It allowed scientists to actually map out the tail of our heliosphere, that region of space that is influenced by the Sun.Įric Christian, an IBEX mission scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said scientists have seen tails around other stars. NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, is a satellite that peers out toward the edge of our solar system. Scientists have thought that our solar system also has a tail, but they just observed it for the first time. If you've ever seen a speeding comet or even an image of one, you've seen that it has a tail.