I was driving through the rain in South Jersey with my Beautiful Assistant when a question popped up. I had noticed that the rainfall was variable: sometimes hard, sometimes not coming down at all.
I( Keith Johnson) wondered aloud whether this meant that the rain throughout South Jersey was changing as time went by, or whether we were just driving through patches with different conditions. Maybe it was raining in Glassboro, but not in Mullica Hill. Or maybe the rainfall was slowly increasing and decreasing in both towns simultaneously.
The way to find out, I opined, was to gather more data. I could ask BA to drive her car over the same route I was following, but 15 minutes behind me. We could then compare notes to tell whether rainfall rates changed at both locations at the same time, or whether I would encounter a sudden downpour 15 minutes before she did. I might even see a change she never saw.
NASA is now using that method to investigate a particular sort of cosmic rain. In 1958, Dr. James Van Allen looked at a limited amount of data from the first successful U.S. satellite, Explorer 1. He discovered a donut-shaped belt of energetic charged particles encircling Earth at an altitude of about 1,000 miles.
http://www.nj.com/gloucester/voices/index.ssf/2012/09/south_jersey_skies_measuring_c.html
I( Keith Johnson) wondered aloud whether this meant that the rain throughout South Jersey was changing as time went by, or whether we were just driving through patches with different conditions. Maybe it was raining in Glassboro, but not in Mullica Hill. Or maybe the rainfall was slowly increasing and decreasing in both towns simultaneously.
The way to find out, I opined, was to gather more data. I could ask BA to drive her car over the same route I was following, but 15 minutes behind me. We could then compare notes to tell whether rainfall rates changed at both locations at the same time, or whether I would encounter a sudden downpour 15 minutes before she did. I might even see a change she never saw.
NASA is now using that method to investigate a particular sort of cosmic rain. In 1958, Dr. James Van Allen looked at a limited amount of data from the first successful U.S. satellite, Explorer 1. He discovered a donut-shaped belt of energetic charged particles encircling Earth at an altitude of about 1,000 miles.
http://www.nj.com/gloucester/voices/index.ssf/2012/09/south_jersey_skies_measuring_c.html