Latest Magnetosphere Stories

ESA -- ESA's Cluster mission has revealed a new creation mechanism of 'killer electrons' - highly energetic electrons that are responsible for damaging satellites and posing a serious hazard to astronauts. Over the past five years, a series of discoveries by the multi-spacecraft Cluster mission have significantly enhanced our knowledge of how, where and under which conditions these killer electrons are created in Earth's magnetosphere. Early satellite measurements in the 1950s revealed the...

Berkeley -- Auroras similar to Earth's Northern Lights appear to be common on Mars, according to physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, who have analyzed six years' worth of data from the Mars Global Surveyor. The discovery of hundreds of auroras over the past six years comes as a surprise, since Mars does not have the global magnetic field that on Earth is the source of the aurora borealis and the antipodal aurora australis. According to the physicists, the auroras on Mars...

University of Iowa Space Physicist Don Gurnett and his UI colleagues report that a scientific instrument aboard the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express spacecraft is working perfectly and that its data have so far revealed that Mars' ionosphere -- part of the upper atmosphere -- is very lumpy and complex, and that the instrument can "see" hidden craters and thick layers of ice beneath the planet's surface. Gurnett's findings were scheduled for presentation in the Thursday,...

ESA -- Thanks to measurements by ESA's Cluster mission, a team of European scientists have identified "˜micro'-vortices in Earth's magnetosphere.Such small-scale vortex turbulence, whose existence was predicted through mathematical models, has not been observed before in space. The results are not only relevant for space physics, but also for other applications like research on nuclear fusion. On 9 March 2002, the four Cluster satellites, flying in tetrahedral formation at 100 kilometres...

NASA -- Thanks to observations from the ground and satellites in space, scientists know that the North and South Poles light up at night with Auroras because a "solar wind" of electrified gas continually flows outward from the sun at high speed in all directions, including toward the Earth. Recently, however, NASA and university scientists looking at the Earth's northern and southern auroras were surprised to find they aren't mirror images of each other, as was once...

The ESA Science Programme Committee approved unanimously the extension of the Cluster mission, pushing back the end date from December 2005 to December 2009. This extension will allow the first measurements of space plasmas at both small and large scales simultaneously and the sampling of geospace regions never crossed before by four spacecraft flying in close formation. The Cluster and SOHO missions constitute the first cornerstone of ESA's Horizons 2000 Programme. Together they allow the...

ESA -- Mission controllers cross their fingers whenever the Sun is stormy and their spacecraft have to fly over the South Atlantic. There, even satellites in low orbits suffer many hits by atomic bullets from the Sun. Troublesome faults occur in electronic systems and astronauts see flashes in their eyes. The Earth's magnetic field, which shields our planet against charged atomic particles coming from outer space, is curiously weak in that region. The South Atlantic Anomaly, as the experts...

RAS -- A study of the first double-pulsar binary system to be discovered shows that magnetic interactions between the pulsars are strikingly similar to those between the Sun and the Earth.Radiation and particles emitted from one pulsar appear to have a similar warping effect on the magnetic bubble surrounding its companion star as the solar wind has on the Earth's magnetosphere.The pulsar pair was discovered in 2003 by an international team of scientists, including astronomers from Jodrell...

ESA -- High-speed flows of plasma, propagating from the magnetotail to the Earth at velocities higher than 300 kms-1, are the carriers of decisive amounts of mass, energy and magnetic flux. Published May 7, 2004, in Geophysical Research Letters, a statistical study based on multipoint measurements by the Cluster mission reveals, for the first time, their typical spatial scale. Even before the space age, observers noted that in the arctic winter, when the sky is dark most of the time, the...

USC -- A massive eruption of atomic oxygen from Saturn's outer rings, seen by Cassini's ultraviolet camera as the spacecraft neared its destination, may be an indication that the planet's wispy E ring is eroding so fast that it could disappear within 100 million years if not replenished. Cassini's Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) detected the oxygen atoms spewing into a huge cloud on the dark side of Saturn's rings as Cassini prepared to enter orbit around Saturn in January 2004, said...