Related topics: magnetic field · nasa · space weather · solar wind · spacecraft

The science behind northern lights

(Phys.org)—Northern night skies have recently been alive with light. Those shimmering curtains get their start about 93 million miles away, on the sun.

ACE, workhorse of NASA's heliophysics fleet, is 15

(Phys.org)—The Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) is Earth's vanguard. Orbiting around a point 900,000 miles away between the Earth and our sun, this satellite is ever vigilant, recording the combination of radiation—from ...

Geotail: 20 years of science and still going strong

(Phys.org) -- On July 24, 1992, the joint JAXA/NASA Geotail mission launched into space aboard a Delta II launch vehicle. It was the vanguard for a set of coordinated missions known as the International Solar Terrestrial ...

Mercury's magnetic field measured by MESSENGER orbiter

Researchers working with NASA's Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft report the frequent detections of Kelvin-Helmholtz (KH) waves at the edge of the innermost planet's magnetosphere. ...

IBEX and TWINS join forces to observe a solar storm

(Phys.org) -- On April 5, 2010, the sun spewed a two million-mile-per-hour stream of charged particles toward the invisible magnetic fields surrounding Earth, known as the magnetosphere. As the particles interacted with the ...

Venus found to have aurora type magnetotails

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers studying the planet Venus have found that despite a lack of a magnetic field, the planet has magnetotails, which on Earth are part of the process known as the Northern and Southern Lights. This, ...

Modeling extreme space weather

Explosions on the sun regularly disrupt the magnetic envelope surrounding Earth, but that envelope, the magnetosphere, largely protects the surface of the planet itself from space weather – with one exception. As a rule, ...

Mercury's surprising core and landscape curiosities

(PhysOrg.com) -- On March 17, the tiny MESSENGER spacecraft completed its primary mission to orbit and observe the planet Mercury for one Earth-year. The bounty of surprises from the mission has completely altered our understanding ...

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