Squeaky All Time Record
We easily beat our record high for the day yesterday! The Airport recorded an official high of 29.5ºC and Alberniweather got up to 29.1ºC. The previous record at the Airpot was 27.0ºC in 2006, but the big news is we set a new all time high for the day, just beating a high of 29.4ºC at the Beaver Creek station on September 26, 1949.
We won’t see the same record breaking temperatures today. Our high is only forecast to be 25ºC while the record at the Airport is 29.5ºC (2003) and all time is a scorching 33.5ºC set at Beaver Creek in 1914. Yikes!
Smashing a Moon of an Asteroid.
So the DART mission did its thing yesterday and smashed a spacecraft into an asteroid… or so I thought until I started watching the feed.
There it was, the asteroid, a tiny dot in the spacecrafts targeting camera as it approached at around 30,000kph.
Just a spec in the distance.
But then you start to realize the spec, has a spec!
And that spec of a spec… it’s only 170 metres across… is what they are smashing into!
They crashed into a moon of an asteroid with the precision of just 17 metres. I get worse precision than that sometimes on my GPS phone and they can fling a rocket into space and make it crash into a rock the size of a city block millions of kilometres away. Incredible.
Above is that rock 17 seconds before impact. No doubt they’re going to do a lot of cool science analyzing the rocks while also measuring the path of the asteroid-moon to see if they were able to bump it off course. Pretty fun science!
If you missed the whole thing, you can go check out Dr. Emily Lakdawalla on Twitter. She’s a planetary scientist and rock nerd. Always fun and interesting feed.
Last chance to see Jupiter up close and personal
Make sure you get outside after sunset in the next day or two before we cloud over! Jupiter is at least closest approach to Earth for a few decades and the views have been pretty spectacular. Just the fact that it is incredibly bright over Mt. Arrowsmith is impressive enough! If you have a strong pair of binoculars you should be able to make out some patterns of its clouds. Thanks to CageyRatfish for the pic!
First Pacific Low heads south – only showers
No luck for us in the big rain department as both the European and GFS models now agree the low churning offshore is going to weaken and move into southern Washington on Wednesday evening.
We might get a few showers, but they’ll be light. Then the weather will stay offshore for the rest of the week as high pressure builds back for the weekend. It’ll be another nice weekend. Dry, but nice and continuing dry into next week. Water your plants.
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