-Caveat Lector- Date sent: Sun, 13 Jun 1999 00:17:58 -0700 From: Mitch Battros <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Breaking News <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Earth Changes TV/Breaking News - NASA/SOHO Official Response Official Response From Joseph B. Gurman, NASA/SOHO Project Scientist, Unreported CME...06/12/99 by Mitch Battros (ECTV) Thanks to one of our viewers after a call to help with the investigation, we now have an official response from NASA. A special thanks goes to Father Richard Gant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> for this incredible bit of investigation. Father Gant has a web site as well http://www.solt3.org . Thank you for your efforts. Mr. Gurman states the failure to monitor the CME was do to a "detector was being baked out" and "the reformatting of software". This occurred during an American Astronomical Society meeting in Chicago on June 1st, at which the BCC was covering. It was well attended by physicists, scientist and astronomers. For a moment, when viewing the monitors at the convention they thought they had a "real planet buster" of a CME. After further determination, the scientist realized it was heading away from earth. (What a picture for Warner Brothers, I can see the move now). Mr. Gurman went on to state "If I had to guess" regarding the omission of this date, June 1st, " the LASCO folks (had) no one in over the Memorial Day weekend, and somebody's "automatic" software broke." Below is the original email : You know, it sounds like something that could have happened to me at my University during a dissertation. Quite the story. From: SMTP%"[EMAIL PROTECTED]" To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] CC: Earth Changes TV - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subj: [Fwd: Earth Changes TV/Breaking News - Did NASA Erase It's Tracks?] "Joseph B. Gurman" wrote: Sometimes I wish NASA could be clever enough to stage a coverup, but as far as I can tell, we're not capable of such an effort: after all, when one starts to lie, one has to remember what lie who told whom, and when. Beyond us. Here is my understanding of this "event" and how it got to be a BBC news story. At the Centennial meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Chicago last week --- a meeting very well attended by solar physicists, since the Society was founded by George Ellery Hale, the pioneer solar physicist --- we (actually, ESA paid for most of it) had a Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) booth in the exhibition area. In addition to "canned" videos of past SOHO observations and science presentations, the booth included two PC's connected to the Internet; the PC's were provided by the group at the Naval Research Laboratory who operate the LASCO coronagraphs on SOHO. LASCO and the Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) share electronics, so the NRL people as well as we (the EIT team) both reformat the EIT data and make movies of them. The PC's from NRL were designed to grab movies of the most recent 24 hours or so of images from LASCO C2, LASCO C3, and EIT from machines at the SOHO Experimenters' Operations Facility (EOF) here at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Maryland, via the Internet, and display them for the folks attending the AAS meeting exhibitions. There were two problems with this: 1. The EIT CCD detector was being baked out over the Memorial Day weekend to improve its performance (see: http://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/eit/CCD_bakeout.html for more on CCD detectors and why the EIT one needs to be baked out occasionally) 2. The reformatting software --- that turns the raw telemetry into viewable images --- on the LASCO workstations in the EOF had broken down over the holiday weekend, when noone came in to check on it. (Most of the people who usually did so were in Chicago, and the one other fellow was on his boat on Chesapeake Bay.) So, we didn't have very current movies of LASCO images for the first day and a half of the meeting (May 32 - June 1), and then when the data started flowing again, we saw the great, bright halo coronal mass ejection (CME). Unfortunately, what one needs to determine whether the "halo" CME is headed towards or away from the earth --- they look the same in white-light coronagraph images because the scattering geometry is identical --- is by looking at what happens (or doesn't happen) in the lower corona: i.e., in EIT images.... and we weren't getting any EIT images (aside from "darks" taken with the shutter closed, or calibration images taken with a visible-light lamp flooding the CCD, to calibrate it after the bakeout. This is a standard procedure every time we do a bakeout. So the situation in Chicago was that we had a great-looking halo CME, a substantial number of eager journalists, and no EIT images with which to determine whether the CME was directed or directed toward or away from the earth. The BBC journalist evidently decide he (or she) knew the answer when the SOHO scientists at the AAS meeting were still scratching their heads. The fact that there'd been a press conference the previous morning on the precipitous rise of the new solar activity cycle probably piqued the reporter's interest. And the comment attributed to one solar physicist (my Lab head!) that a CME this big was a "real planet buster" might have been too much for an enterprising newman.woman to resist. Now, why was there a gap in the: http://www.spaceweather.com/java/solar-anim.html animation? I honestly don't know. You should know, however, that www.spaceweather.com is a bit of a rogue operation. First, it's got a .com Internet domain name, which means they can say anything they want without having to be responsible to anyone at NASA (or the taxpayers who pay us). On the other hand, the site is probably a good thing if NASA ever did decide to try to "cover up" something of general interest, for precisely the same reason. I do know the Public Affairs folks at NASA HQ have real heartburn over the ways in which the folks at that Web site appear to steal credit for scientific work in which they were not involved. (Frankly, it doesn't bother me all that much, because it's the science that the taxpayers are paying for that's the important story, not who did it or where.) If I had to guess --- and this is complete speculation --- as to why their site hadn't updated images during the days in question, I would ascribe it to the same gotcha as bit the LASCO folks: no one was in over the Memorial Day weekend, and somebody's "automatic" software broke. So there's a few facts and an idle speculation, for what they're worth. My $0.02, Joe Gurman U.S. project scientist for SOHO <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Mitch Battros Producer - Earth Changes TV Web Site: http://www.earthchangesTV.com DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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