GISS has been in the news again – 2 weeks after supporting the NASA administrator’s visit, GISS hosted GSFC leadership including Dennis Andrucyk, the Director of GSFC. ADNET staff and GISS’ FOM Sabrina Hosein organized both visits, improvising a presentation space in the midst of our building renovations that showed GISS in its best light.
The Moon to Mars (M2M) Space Weather Analysis Office is supporting the Artemis I mission by monitoring space weather conditions and providing expert analysis to NASA’s Space Radiation Analysis Group (SRAG). M2M is running various models and software as part of the Integrated Solar Energetic Proton Alert/Warning System (ISEP) project and has a dedicated space weather analyst who is monitoring and interpreting the model outputs around the clock. SESDA staff and M2M partners are providing 24/7 support to ensure that these models are running properly and ensuring that any downtime is minimal, so that there are continuous space weather analyses in support of the mission.
SESDA staff set up and monitored a climate-focused All Hands meeting held at GISS with NASA’s Administrator Bill Nelson and ensured that all went smoothly. Turnout was over 60 people.
ADNET scientists Jim Acker and Alexis Hunzinger recently authored a study that was featured on the cover of the journal Earth. In October 2013, ocean color remote sensing data acquired by the Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite showed a unique elevated phytoplankton chlorophyll feature extending eastward from Chuuk Lagoon in the Federated States of Micronesia. Analysis of Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA-2) windspeed and wind direction data, enabled with the NASA Giovanni system, indicated that alternating high and low windspeed periods, combined with seasonal wind directions and the physiography of the atoll, likely created ideal surface ocean conditions for a phytoplankton bloom in and adjacent to the lagoon. Light availability for photosynthesis may also have contributed to bloom timing and development.
In support of NASA’s Goddard Instrument Field Team (GIFT), SESDA’s Caela Barry acted as the logistics and public engagement lead during a May field trip to California’s Medicine Lake Volcano and Lava Beds National Monument. While there, the team used instrumentation such as magnetometers, LIDAR, and ground penetrating radar to locate, map, and characterize several lava tubes. The results of their measurements will serve as baseline processes and terrestrial analogs for similar Lunar and Martian volcanic terrains. During the trip, Caela posted the team’s activities and progress on the @NASAExpeditions (Twitter) and @NASAEarth (Instagram) accounts, with each account receiving hundreds of thousands of impressions. While at the site, Caela also distributed outreach materials and hosted interactive presentations for the park’s rangers and visitors.
The Astrophysical Journal has accepted for publication the paper, “The Great Dimming of Betelgeuse: A Surface Mass Ejection (SME) and its Consequences” by Dupree et al. The paper analyzed special data taken by the SESDA team using the SECCHI/HI-2 telescope on STEREO Ahead, taking advantage of the spacecraft’s unique position, and rolling by 180°, to observe Betelgeuse when it could not easily be observed from Earth. The paper concludes that a substantial surface mass ejection (SME) occurred and moved out through the extended atmosphere of the supergiant. Following the SME, Betelgeuse was left with a cooler average photosphere, an unusual short photometric oscillation, reduced velocity excursions, and the disappearance of the ~400-day pulsation in the optical and radial velocity for more than two years following the Great Dimming. The first indication that Betelgeuse was affected by the SME was provided by the SECCHI observations.
Congratulations to NASA/GSFC and its partners on the successful launch of the Endurance suborbital rocket on May 10, 2022 at from Ny-Ålesund in Svalbard, Norway. Despite numerous challenges that included blizzard weather conditions, delayed shipments of essential flight hardware, a snow mobile accident, and an extensive COVID-19 outbreak at the launch base, the team bravely persevered with resolving last minute technical problems in time for a narrow launch window of low solar and geomagnetic activity. SESDA instrument engineers provided critical support to the development, integration, and testing of the E-field booms and Dual Electrostatic Analyzers (DESA) which are vital to achieving the mission’s primary goal of measuring the Earth’s weak global electric potential.
SESDA staff has supported operations of SOHO’s Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) for over 25 years. One of the primary objectives of this instrument is to image the solar corona to study phenomena such as Coronal Mass Ejections (CME’s). A remarkable and unintended by-product of LASCO has been the discovery of over 4000 sungrazing comets through NASA’s Sungrazer Citizen Science Program conducted jointly with the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). In 2022, this program partnered with NASA’s Open-Source Science Initiative in a data challenge to develop artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) tools to automate the identification and tracking of faint comets that approach the Sun. This challenge has already reaped benefits by enabling the discovery of two previously undetected comets from 2005 and 2016.
At the SuperComputing 2021 (SC21) event, the SESDA HECN team demonstrated the use of NVMe over Fabric over TCP (NVMe-OF/TCP) technology across a 400-GigE wide-area network (WAN) infrastructure using 200-GigE Mellanox NICs, NVMe SSD drives, and PCIe Gen4 x16 slots in the demo servers.
The new NVMe-OF/TCP technology is now fully supported by recent Linux kernels which allowed showcasing very high performance disk-to-memory network data transfers between a pair of high performance 4×200-GigE SuperMicro AMD EPYC NVMe servers in the MAX Suite that was routed across the 400-GigE ESnet/Internet2 WAN path to the StarLight Booth at SC21 and then looped to the MAX Suite. An aggregate throughput of 24.35 GB/s (194.8 Gigabits per second (Gbps)) was achieved with 64 parallel reads across 16 NVMe drives, with only a moderate level of system CPU utilization on the server. When looping the traffic at StarLight instead of SC21, which reduced the RTT from 19.7 ms to 14.7 ms, aggregate throughput of 25.11 GB/s (200.9 Gbps) was achieved. On purely local transfers between the two servers, an aggregate throughput of 44.53 GB/s (356.2 Gbps) was reached.
