Latest Explorer program Stories

Researchers using a fleet of five NASA satellites have discovered that explosions of magnetic energy a third of the way to the moon power substorms that cause sudden brightenings and rapid movements of the aurora borealis, called the Northern Lights.The culprit turns out to be magnetic reconnection, a common process that occurs throughout the universe when stressed magnetic field lines suddenly snap to a new shape, like a rubber band that's been stretched too far."We discovered what...

GREENBELT, Md. -- A new NASA mission could discover the shape of space that has been distorted by a spinning black hole's crushing gravity, and explore the structure and effects of the formidable magnetic field around magnetars, dead stars with magnetic fields trillions of times stronger than Earth's. Current missions either don't have the resolution to do this, or in the case of magnetic field imaging, simply can't do this because magnetic fields are invisible. The proposed new mission,...

In recent studies, physicists may have not only found a new model for the creation of our universe, they may also have found an entirely new view on time altogether. The journal Physical Review Letters shares details about a recent study of the cosmic microwave background "“ light emitted when the universe was only 400,000 years old. It is relic radiation that fills the universe and acts as evidence for the Big Bang theory. In 1992 the Cobe satellite discovered tiny fluctuations on the...

University of California, Berkeley scientists quietly switched off one of the campus's working satellites in April, ending a 10-year series of ups and downs for NASA's first and only low-cost, university-class Explorer spacecraft.The Cosmic Hot Interstellar Plasma Spectrometer satellite (CHIPSat), funded by NASA in 1998, was designed to look for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) emissions from the bubble of hot gas that envelops our solar system out to a distance of several hundred light years.Five...

Since its launch five years ago, the Galaxy Evolution Explorer has photographed hundreds of millions of galaxies in ultraviolet light. M106 is one of those galaxies, and from 22 light years away, it strikes a pose in blue and gold for this new commemorative portrait.The galaxy's extended arms are the blue filaments that curve around its edge, creating its outer disk. Tints of blue in M106's arms reveal hot, young massive stars. Traces of gold toward the center show an older stellar population...

A new image from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer shows baby stars sprouting in the backwoods of a galaxy -- a relatively desolate region of space more than 100,000 light-years from the galaxy's bustling center. The striking image, a composite of ultraviolet data from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer and radio data from the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array in New Mexico, shows the Southern Pinwheel galaxy, also known simply as M83. In the new view, the main spiral, or stellar, disk...

One of the most dynamic events in the interaction between the Sun and the Earth is a "˜substorm', an explosive reshaping of the Earth's outer magnetic field. To better understand substorms, scientists in Europe and North America are studying them from space using the Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) satellites launched by NASA in 2007 and from the ground using a network of all-sky cameras. In her talk on Tuesday 1 April at the RAS National...

UK space scientist Emeritus Professor Alan Wells is to speak at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston in February on: International Cooperation in Developing Swift and its Scientific Achievements.Professor Wells' presentation will be on Saturday 16th February at around 11.00 a.m. as part of a symposium entitled: Worldwide Hunt to Solve the Mystery of Gamma-Ray Bursts. In it, he will discuss the breadth of international collaborations, including the prominent...

Explorer 1 was the first satellite launched by the United States when it was sent into space on January 31, 1958. Following the launch of the Soviet Union's Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957, the U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency was directed to launch a satellite using its Jupiter C rocket developed under the direction of Dr. Wernher von Braun. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory received the assignment to design, build and operate the artificial satellite that would serve as the rocket's payload. JPL...

Oldest known short gamma ray burst occurred halfway back to Big BangUsing the powerful one-two combo of NASA's Swift satellite and the Gemini Observatory, astronomers from a number of institutions, including Johns Hopkins, have detected a mysterious type of cosmic explosion farther back in time than ever before. The explosion, known as a short gamma-ray burst (GRB), took place 7.4 billion years ago, more than halfway back to the Big Bang."This discovery dramatically moves back the time...