Watts Up With That?

GLAST Blast – click for larger image

Today, NASA launched into space a new telescope to explore high-energy cosmic events in distant galaxies. 

The Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, known as GLAST, will detect intense energy emitted from some of the universe’s most powerful phenomena. See the official GLAST website here:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/main/index.html

Scientists say GLAST will aid research into massive black holes as well as neutron stars, which have cores so dense that a spoonful of their matter would weigh over one billion tons.

One of the most interesting things to me is the Cosmic Ray study the spacecraft will do, specifically looking at gamma ray bursts:

“Cosmic rays, the highest-energy particles in nature, are thought to be formed when stars collapse and produce tremendous shock waves. GLAST will test this theory by measuring the spectra of gamma rays from the remnants of supernovae, where cosmic rays should be abundant,” says GLAST Interdisciplinary Scientist Charles Dermer of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC.

The mission was developed by NASA in collaboration with institutions in five other countries.

I’m waiting for May global land + ocean temperature data to be published from Hadley Climate Research Unit, at which time I’ll also show a comparison to GISS.

Since I did pretty well at guessing what RSS May data value would be, guessing 0.05 to -0.15°C, and having it end up at -.083°C, I’m going to put forth one for CRU.

My SWAG for HadCRUT is between +0.10 and +.0.17°C

Here is April 2008 from HadCRUT at 0.25°C

Click for a larger image

Reference: HadCRUT3 anomaly data which can be found here
description of the HadCRUT3 data file columns is here