Predicting space weather could save satellites
A new space weather model under development at Los Alamos National Laboratory could help give a 24-hour warning before a storm of charged particles from the sun bombards crucial satellites, potentially knocking them out of service.
These "killer electrons" move more erratically during solar storms — a type of space weather where particles from the sun smack into Earth's magnetic field — so being able to predict that variability is key for spacecraft operators (Full story).
Also in Universe Today
What's actually going on in that cryptic black hole photo?
Event Horizon Telescope, NSF Image.
From our far-off view of this great black hole, it might look like a bright, flat ring. But that's not exactly the case. We're largely seeing the "face" of the event horizon, like the face of a coin, as opposed to the side or edge, explained Chris Fryer, an astrophysicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory who had no role in the collaboration.
So when the light (emitted in radio wave form) from the event horizon finally reached us, it had been distorted. Consequently the image, even with correction and sophisticated computer modeling, isn't perfect. But it's pretty darn good. "I was surprised how good it looked knowing there were all these additional paths it had to travel," said Fryer (Full Story).
New open-source software predicts impacts of extreme events on grids
Carleton Coffrin, LANL photo.
A new, free, open-source software reliably predicts how damage from hurricanes, ice storms, earthquakes and other extreme events will restrict power delivery from utility grids. The Severe Contingency Solver for Electric Power Transmission is the only software available—commercially or open-source—that reliably supports analysis of extreme events that cause widespread damage.
“The software was designed specifically to address extreme events where damage to the power grid and the resulting outages are significant,” said Carleton Coffrin (Full story)
Also from R&D this week:
Scientific computing in the cloud gets down to Earth
In a groundbreaking effort, seismology researchers have conducted a continent-scale survey for seismic signatures of industrial activity in the Amazon Web Services commercial cloud (AWS), then rapidly downloaded the results without storing raw data or needing a local supercomputer.
"Using a traditional workflow, to download-store-calculate on a desktop, this work would've taken more than 40 days to do. Using the cloud service, it took just under 7 hours," said Jonathan MacCarthy of the Earth and Environmental Sciences division at Los Alamos National Laboratory. "To our knowledge, this is the first application of streaming cloud-based research in seismology," (Full story).
Also in PhysOrg
Thom Mason takes the helm at Los Alamos
Thom Mason, LANL photo.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that Thom Mason, who was director at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for 10 years, is now the director at Los Alamos. “I grew up in a science family,” he explains. “My dad worked at a Canadian national lab, so it was sort of the family business, and it never really occurred to me to do anything else.”
He pauses, reconsidering. “I did think about doing an English degree,” he says. “And I decided that if I did physics, I could still read books. But if I took English, I probably couldn’t have physics as a hobby," (full story).
