On Feb. 9, 2017, NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, known as MMS, began a three-month long journey into a new orbit. MMS flies in a highly elliptical orbit around Earth and the new orbit will take MMS twice as far ...
Space Exploration
Feb 9, 2017
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34
Physicist Fatima Ebrahimi at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has published a paper showing that magnetic reconnection—the process in which magnetic field lines snap together ...
Plasma Physics
Jan 23, 2017
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112
Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have for the first time directly observed a phenomenon that had previously only been hypothesized to exist. The phenomenon, plasmoid ...
Plasma Physics
Jan 9, 2017
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49
Scientists are closer than ever to unraveling a process called magnetic reconnection that triggers explosive phenomena throughout the universe. Solar flares, northern lights and geomagnetic storms that can disrupt cell phone ...
Plasma Physics
Dec 8, 2016
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17
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Princeton University have proposed a groundbreaking solution to a mystery that has puzzled physicists for decades. At issue ...
Plasma Physics
Nov 22, 2016
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1298
NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, or MMS, is breaking records. MMS now holds the Guinness World Record for highest altitude fix of a GPS signal. Operating in a highly elliptical orbit around Earth, the MMS satellites ...
Space Exploration
Nov 4, 2016
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4
Phenomena like solar flares and auroras are consequences of magnetic reconnection in the near-Earth space. These "magnetic reconnection" events are akin to magnetic explosions that accelerate particles as they rapidly change ...
Plasma Physics
Oct 5, 2016
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0
On Sept. 15, 2016, NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale, or MMS, mission achieved a new record: Its four spacecraft are flying only four-and-a-half miles apart, the closest separation ever of any multi-spacecraft formation. The ...
Space Exploration
Sep 21, 2016
1
12
Solar wind forms the energy source for aurora explosions. How does the Earth's magnetosphere take in the energy of the solar wind? An international team led by Hiroshi Hasegawa and Naritoshi Kitamura (ISAS/JAXA) analyzed ...
Space Exploration
Jul 22, 2016
28
141
Like sending sensors up into a hurricane, NASA has flown four spacecraft through an invisible maelstrom in space, called magnetic reconnection. Magnetic reconnection is one of the prime drivers of space radiation and so it ...
Space Exploration
May 12, 2016
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