It turns out weather on other planets is a lot like on Earth
What do the clouds on Jupiter, dust storms on Mars and rainstorms on Titan all have in common? They look like they belong on Earth.
As we venture through the universe, scientists are finding uncanny — and sometimes unexpected — hints of Earth on other planets and moons. Clouds on Jupiter swirl like ocean eddies on Earth, and dust storms that act like hurricanes can inundate Mars. Even though these celestial bodies can be hundreds of million miles away from us, the same laws of physics apply, and what happens there can help us learn more about worlds that humans have yet to visit.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Forbes
an hour ago
- Forbes
ESA's Solar Orbiter Should Solve Mystery Of Sun's Outermost Atmosphere
ESA's Solar Orbiter mission will face the Sun from within the orbit of Mercury at its closest ... More approach. The European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter mission recently stunned the world with the first-ever full images of our Sun's South pole, proving that this was going to be a mission like no other. Using an orbital gravity assist from the planet Venus, the Solar Orbiter mission spacecraft was able to maneuver into an orbit that has taken it to an angle 17 degrees below the Sun's equator. Over the coming years, the spacecraft will tilt its orbit even further, so the best views are yet to come, says ESA. The 1.2-billion-euro Solar Orbiter mission, with NASA participation, should finally help us understand the origin of the Sun's solar winds as well as our understanding of the Sun's poles. And arguably most importantly, it should solve the puzzle of why our star's outermost atmosphere, or corona, is heated to millions of degrees Kelvin and is thus so much hotter than the Sun's own surface. By contrast, our Sun's visible photosphere, or surface, averages only 5,500 degrees K. With Solar Orbiter, we are clearly seeing energy releases on the nano-flare scale, Daniel Mueller, a solar physicist and ESA project scientist for both ESA's SOHO and Solar Orbiter missions to the Sun, tells me in his office in The Netherlands. But the question is, would these nano-flares continue like that infinitely, or is there a certain lower limit to the production of these nano-flares, Mueller wonders. The puzzle is whether these nano-flares are enough to heat up the Sun's corona to the temperatures with which it is routinely measured. A Unique View Launched in 2020, from its highly elliptical orbit just inside Mercury's perihelion, the closest point in our innermost planet's solar orbit, the ESA spacecraft offers the best views yet of our own yellow dwarf star. We can see on scales down to about 200 kilometers on the Sun, which shows us a lot of dynamics of our star, says Mueller. And thanks to its newly tilted orbit around the Sun, the European Space Agency-led Solar Orbiter spacecraft is the first to image the Sun's poles from outside the ecliptic plane (the imaginary geometric plane in which our Earth orbits the Sun), says ESA. We observed the Sun's North pole at the end of this past April, says Mueller. But we passed the Southern pole first and then the Northern pole six weeks later, he says. At the moment, as seen from Earth, the Solar Orbiter is almost behind the Sun, so the data downlink has slowed to a trickle. But by early October, Mueller expects to have downloaded all the data from Solar Orbiter's Spring polar observations of the Sun. And within a matter of two to three months after the data is on the ground, the first scientific results will have been written up and submitted to journals for publication, says Mueller. These observations are also key to understanding the Sun's magnetic field and why it flips roughly every 11 years, coinciding with a peak in solar activity, says ESA. The spacecraft's instruments show that the Sun's South pole is a bit of a magnetic mess now, with both North and South polarity magnetic fields present, ESA notes. Ready To Flip Right now, there is not a clear dominant magnetic polarity, but a mix of the two, says Mueller. And that is exactly what you would expect to find during the maximum of the Sun's activity cycle, when the magnetic field is about to flip, he says. The real applications are for space weather predictions. Case in point, better space weather forecasting may have saved many of Elon Musk's 523 Starlink satellites that reentered Earth's atmosphere between 2020 and 2024. This period coincides with the rising phase of solar cycle 25, which has shown itself to be more intense than the previous solar cycle, the authors of a 2025 paper appearing in the journal Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences write. Our results indisputably show that satellites reenter faster with higher geomagnetic activity, the authors note. There was a big solar storm that caused the earth's upper Earth atmosphere to expand, so, the satellites experienced more drag, and therefore didn't make it to orbit, says Mueller. One option may have been simply to hold off on launches until this increased period of solar activity enabled a less risky geomagnetic environment in Earth's upper atmosphere. The hope is that the Solar Orbiter mission and other missions like it will lead to better and more reliable space weather predictions that could potentially save hundreds of millions of dollars in the commercial satellite industry. Solar Orbiter should do its share in solving both pure solar physics conundrums as well as in more practical applications like space weather. The good news is that the spacecraft still has plenty of fuel left. Our current funding goes until the end of 2026, but because we had a picture-perfect launch provided by United Launch Alliance and NASA, we saved a lot of fuel, says Mueller. So, the onboard fuel reserves are so large that we can keep going for a long time, he says.
USA Today
2 hours ago
- USA Today
When is the next SpaceX rocket launch? Date, where to watch
SpaceX is set to have a launch once again in summer 2025, which comes after a recent incident: a Starship exploded while going through engine testing in Texas earlier in the week. "The spacecraft, standing nearly 400 feet tall when fully stacked, did not injure or endanger anyone when it exploded in a fireball that could be seen for miles, SpaceX said," per USA TODAY. But as usual with SpaceX, the company's next mission will go on. If you're wondering what that's all about? You've come to the right place. Here's what we know about that next mission that's set to launch this weekend: When is the next SpaceX launch? It's on Sunday, June 22. What time is the SpaceX launch? It's scheduled for 1:47 a.m. ET. What's happening in the next SpaceX launch? Per SpaceFlight Now: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch another batch of 27 Starlink V2 Mini satellites into low Earth orbit. The rocket will take a north-easterly trajectory once it leaves the pad at Space Launch Complex 40. A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, the first stage booster, tail number B1069, flying for a 25th time, will target a landing on the droneship, 'A Shortfall of Gravitas,' positioned in the Atlantic Ocean. Where is the SpaceX craft launching from? That would be Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. How can I watch the SpaceX launch live? Check SpaceX's website to see if there's a livestream.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Hurricanes and sandstorms can be forecast 5,000 times faster thanks to new Microsoft AI model
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A new artificial intelligence (AI) model can predict major weather events faster and more accurately than some of the world's most widely used forecasting systems. The model, called Aurora, is trained on more than 1 million hours of global atmospheric data, including weather station readings, satellite images and radar measurements. Scientists at Microsoft say it's likely the largest dataset ever used to train a weather AI model. Aurora correctly forecast that Typhoon Doksuri would strike the northern Philippines four days before the storm made landfall in July 2023. At the time, official forecasts placed the storm's landfall over Taiwan — several hundred miles away. It also outperformed standard forecasting tools used by agencies, including the U.S. National Hurricane Center and the Joint Typhoon Warning Center. It delivered more accurate five-day storm tracks and produced high-resolution forecasts up to 5,000 times faster than conventional weather models powered by supercomputers. More broadly, Aurora beat existing systems in predicting weather conditions over a 14-day period in 91% of cases, the scientists said. They published their findings May 21 in the journal Nature. Researchers hope Aurora and models like it could support a new approach to predicting environmental conditions called Earth system forecasting, where a single AI model simulates weather, air quality and ocean conditions together. This could help produce faster and more consistent forecasts, especially in places that lack access to high-end computing or comprehensive monitoring infrastructure. Related: Google builds an AI model that can predict future weather catastrophes Aurora belongs to a class of large-scale AI systems known as foundation models — the same category of AI models that power tools like ChatGPT. Foundation models can be adapted to different tasks because they're designed to learn general patterns and relationships from large volumes of training data, rather than being built for a single, fixed task. In Aurora's case, the model learns to generate forecasts in a matter of seconds by analyzing weather patterns from sources like satellites, radar and weather stations, as well as simulated forecasts, the researchers said. The model can then be fine-tuned for a wide range of scenarios with relatively little extra data — unlike traditional forecasting models, which are typically built for narrow, task-specific purposes and often need retraining to adapt. The diverse dataset Aurora is trained on not only results in greater accuracy in general versus conventional methods, but also means the model is better at forecasting extreme events, researchers said. Related stories —Google's DeepMind AI can make better weather forecasts than supercomputers —Is climate change making the weather worse? —What is the Turing test? How the rise of generative AI may have broken the famous imitation game In one example, Aurora successfully predicted a major sandstorm in Iraq in 2022, despite having limited air quality data. It also outperformed wave simulation models at forecasting ocean swell height and direction in 86% of tests, showing it could extract useful patterns from complex data even when specific inputs were missing or incomplete. "It's got the potential to have [a] huge impact because people can really fine tune it to whatever task is relevant to them … particularly in countries which are underserved by other weather forecasting capabilities," study co-author Megan Stanley, a senior researcher at Microsoft, said in a statement. Microsoft has made Aurora's code and training data publicly available for research and experimentation. The model has been integrated into services like MSN Weather, which itself is integrated into tools like the Windows Weather app and Microsoft's Bing search results.
