Over the past couple of days, many social media sites showed a mysterious blue sphere in space that was taken by NASA's Sun-Observing STEREO spacecraft/satellite. Many conspiracy theories took hold as to whether it was some sort of unidentified flying object- aliens to be exact. Sorry to break your wonder but science's truth is much more mundane.
One of the cameras from the STEREO HI1 Satellite which normally shows an empty field of stars that are usually light years away, captured a giant blue sphere for a few frames before it vanished. However, many experts from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center said what you're actually seeing is the Sun due to a data processing error. Two sets of the data were placed over the other into a single image.
Both are pictures of the sun, however the image on the right is flipped, rotated, and layered on top of an image taken by the HI1 camera. When the data gets sent back to Earth it basically gets bundled together with every camera they have set up around the sun (which is quite a few, 5 to be exact) just to save space. NASA said the computers that receive the images are capable of separating but sometimes they show up jumbled.
Many people have said that this was a sort of cover up because how can it be just a technical error? Well think about, many NASA programs have been cut as a whole because it's not as significantly important as how Apple provides the next new iPhone. Even the Obama Administration proposed a smaller 2017 NASA budget of 19 billion which is 300 million less than it's budget in 2016. Deep space exploration programs involving both humans to the Red Planet and robots to a Jovian moon have been launched for further delay.
STEREO has been around for about ten years. It has providing data, structure of the solar system, and discovering mechanisms and views of solar particle spurs. It's great that we have it up there because we can study how solar plasma can trigger magnetic storms, like how the moon affects our ocean.
What STEREO is actually doing is a lot cooler than a small misconception social media sites present. Look closely at the hard work that scientist put into showing you the sites of our solar system and how things work. We are so focused on our fantasies that misshape the reality of things. I mean, who doesn't wonder about extraterrestrial possibilities? But going over the top and believing that NASA and our government are covering up some sort of truth is absurd. It's important to appreciate the sites we are given and learn about them more efficiently.
