Bøger af Sten Odenwald

This book covers the history and science behind solar storms and space weather and how it has impacted human technology and thinking since the time of the ancient Babylonians. Using newspaper accounts and historical records, the many ways that space weather have impacted humans is explored from first-hand accounts. Also, the science behind space weather is explored starting with the birth of our sun, through modern supercomputer modeling of the Space Age. Space weather begins below the surface of our sun and through solar flares, coronal mass ejections and the solar wind, washes ashore many diverse phenomena on our planet. Solar storms cause electrical power outages, satellite failures, shortwave radio interference and enhanced radiation doses to passengers on jets as well as astronauts working in space. This book begins with ancient reports of gods batteling in the skies, and advances to telegraph interruptions in the 1800's described my numerous newspaper reports. Then in the 20th century we see radio broadcast interference, incidents during World War II and the Vietnam War, as well as a growing list of satellite malfunctions during the space age. Meanwhile, scientific knowledge grows by leaps and bounds as astronmers discover the sunspot cycle, and powerful telescopes begin to monitor the sun on the ground and in space to stay ahead of the sun's stormy weather. Today, the news media carry routine reports of impending storms and enterprising social media broadcasters give us up-to-the-minute detailed scientific reports of what to expect. Science continues to advance as powerful physics-based models are being run on supercomputers to anticipate the shape of the next sunspot cycle and how storm clouds spotted on the sun, may travel to Earth in the ensuing days to rock-and-roll our technology and even our psyches! Among its 370 pages, the book includes 296 B/W and full-color illustrations, hundreds of newspaper headlines, and extensive scientific background information describing all aspects of the human impacts of space weather. Also included is a chapter on DIY space weather forecasting in which you can download apps to your smartphone to monitor space weather, build your own magnetic storm detectors, or join citizen science groups where thousands of enthusiasts help scientists understand space weather even better.

For thousands of years humans have flirted with understanding space. But now it seems there are so many loose ends in 20th century physics that we are forced to have a closer look at this thing we call space. What we do know from where we stand today, is that virtually everything we thought we knew about space because of our 'common sense' actually turns out to be mostly wrong when you look at the details. This book is a guide to how this search is moving forward, from our common sense ideas to the frontiers of quantum gravity and black hole research.

Interplanetary travel? No one ever thought it would be this hard, especially the folks that are not literally 'rocket scientists'! Why is it that 50 years after the official start of the Space Age we do not have colonies on the moon and Mars already? Why are we still plodding along in Earth orbit? There are a million of these kinds of questions you can ask, but when you dig into their answers you uncover something very odd indeed. In my previous book 'Interstellar Travel: An Astronomer's Guide' I laid out all of the astronomical challenges to interstellar travel and colonization. The bottom line was that this was an adventure filled with dreams but no technology to get us there. In this companion book, 'Interplanetary Travel: An Astronomer's Guide', we discover that in fact we have all the technology we need to make it happen, but our current problem is we lack dreams. Think about it. Most of the science fiction you read is all about interstellar travel. Our little neighborhood in the universe is almost always given short shrift. We have no dreams about our own solar system that can stand toe-to-toe with the technological fantasy of interstellar empires and exploration. We have no dreams about planetary colonization, or stories to entice us to invest in this effort. There are no great expectations about what we will find that is worth going after. So as an astronomer, I look at interplanetary travel as very much the odd duck. It's not that we don't have the technology. The problem is Congress can't see the point in the investment and rushed timetable. Yet engineers keep plugging ahead, literally on their lunch-hours and coffee breaks, and developing what is needed on their benches and in their laboratories. Funded by their own dreams, and small pots of money cobbled together from government and private grants, they steadily advance the limits of what we can do. In this book, I want to show you some of the best ideas we have about interplanetary travel. Does it really make sense to travel outside the asteroid belt, when all you will find there are moons made of ice? There is an entire mythology that has grown up in science fiction that has human miners spread across the solar system, but the astronomical reality is that beyond Mars, all you will find is ice. Mining the ice on the moons of Saturn is far more expensive than on the moons of Jupiter, so astronomy limits our economic activities to basically the inner solar system! This book is not just a about limits, but about what kinds of considerations go into making interplanetary travel an economic reality. In the end, you will discover that our future in space will depend on some very hard thinking about how we see ourselves interacting with the universe in the near future.

This is a companion guide to Odenwald's previous book, The 23rd Cycle: Learning to live with a stormy star. It is a fast-paced chronicle of over 2000 years of solar storms that have caused not only panic and fear, but have impacted virtually every technology that has been developed during the last 200 years including telegraphs, telephones, radio communications, satellite operations, the electrical power grid and human operations in space. Culled from thousands of newspaper headlines and stories since the early-1800s, this book gives a personal, human insight to the most dramatic 150 'space weather' events of the last few millennia. The Great 1859 Superstorm is recounted from a variety of diary entries and numerous newspaper stories from around the world.

Cosmic History II continues our exploration of the events in the cosmic timeline from the end of the last Ice Age some 20,000 years ago, to the present time. It also includes predicted or likely events extending from the near future to the unimaginable far future when time itself may come to a final end. A companion guide to the full-color and illustrated book Eternity: A User's Guide, this book is designed as a 'twitterized' flyover of thousands of events in astronomy, geology, human history and many more significant threads: Each with their own fascinating story to tell about our most distant past, and the incomprehensible future to some

"Whether searching for extra-terrestrial life, managing the effects of space weather, or learning about dark matter, the study [of] astrophysics has profound implications for us all. NASA scientist and astronomer Sten Odenwald explains the key concepts of this vast topic, bringing clarity to some of the great mysteries of space"--Publisher marketing.

By a NASA educator, this photo treasury presents 100 eclectic objects - from Stonehenge to Sputnik - and explains their significance to the history of space exploration.

On March 13, 1989, the entire Quebec power grid collapsed, automatic garage doors in California suburbs began to open and close without apparent reason, and microchip production came to a halt in the Northeast; in space, communications satellites had to be manually repointed after flipping upside down, and pressure readings on hydrogen tank supplies on board the Space Shuttle Discovery peaked, causing NASA to consider aborting the mission. What was the cause of all these seemingly disparate events? Sten Odenwald gives convincing evidence of the mischievous-and potentially catastrophic-power of solar storms and the far-reaching effects of the coming "e;big one"e; brewing in the sun and estimated to culminate in the twenty-third cycle in the year 2001 and beyond. When the sun undergoes its cyclic "e;solar maximum,"e; a time when fierce solar flares and storms erupt, fantastic auroras will be seen around the world. But the breathtaking spectacles will herald a potentially disastrous chain of events that merit greater preparation than Y2K. Is anyone listening?The 23rd Cycle traces the previously untold history of solar storms and the ways in which they were perceived by astronomers-and even occasionally covered up by satellite companies. Punctuated with an insert containing dramatic color images showing the erupting sun, the book also includes a history of the record of auroral sightings, accounts of communications blackouts from the twentieth century, a list of industries sensitive to solar storms, and information about radiation and health issues.