Latest Magnetosphere Stories

GREENBELT, Md., Oct. 27 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The magnetometers developed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., for the Juno mission to Jupiter were delivered recently to Lockheed Martin in Denver, Colo. Designed and built by an in-house team of Goddard scientists, engineers and technicians, this instrument will map the planet's magnetic field with great accuracy and observe its variations over time. Each of the two vector magnetometers carries with it a pair of...

Flight Dynamics data from THEMIS-B (one of the two ARTEMIS spacecraft) indicated that one of the EFI (electric field instrument)spherical tip masses may have been struck by a meteoroid at 0605 UT on October 14. All science instruments continue to collect data. The probe and science instruments aboard the spacecraft continue to operate nominally. The upcoming insertion into Lissajous orbit will not be interrupted.ARTEMIS stands for "Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of...

From Earth, the Sun looks like a calm, placid body that does little more than shine brightly while marching across the sky. Images from a bit closer, of course, show it's an unruly ball of hot gas that can expel long plumes out into space "“ but even this isn't the whole story. Surrounding the Sun is a roiling wind of electrons and protons that shows constant turbulence at every size scale: long streaming jets, smaller whirling eddies, and even microscopic movements as charged particles...

The aurora borealis, or Northern Lights, have dwindled in the last five years, becoming more rare than at any other time in the last hundred years, said the Finnish Meteorological Institute on Tuesday. The Northern Lights typically follow an eleven-year "solar cycle," in which frequency of the phenomena increases to a maximum point then begins to taper off toward a minimum and then repeats the cycle. The last solar minimum occurred in 2008, but seems to have continued "on and on and on,"...

The Cassini spacecraft has made the first observations from within the radio aurora of another planet than Earth. The measurements, which were taken when the spacecraft flew through an active auroral region in 2008, show some similarities and some contrasts between the radio auroral emissions generated at Saturn and those at Earth.  Results were presented last week by Dr Laurent Lamy at the European Planetary Science Congress in Rome, and recently published in Geophysical Research...

A new movie and images showing Saturn's shimmering aurora over a two-day period are helping scientists understand what drives some of the solar system's most impressive light shows. The movie and images are part of a new study that, for the first time, extracts auroral information from the entire catalogue of Saturn images taken by the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer instrument (VIMS) aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft. These images and preliminary results are being presented by Tom...

Today (September 1), space scientists around the world are celebrating ten years of ground-breaking discoveries by 'Cluster', a mission that is illuminating the mysteries of the magnetosphere, the northern lights and the solar wind.Cluster is a European Space Agency mission, launched in summer 2000. It consists of a unique constellation of four spacecraft flying in formation around the Earth, studying the interaction between the solar wind and the magnetosphere. The spacecraft each carry an...

LAUREL, Md., Aug. 18 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), with help from The Boeing Company (NYSE: BA) and Iridium Communications Inc. (Nasdaq: IRDM), has successfully implemented a new space-based system to monitor Earth's space environment. Known as the Active Magnetosphere and Planetary Electrodynamics Response Experiment (AMPERE), the system provides real-time magnetic field measurements using commercial satellites as part of a new...

Imagine floating 35,000 miles above the sunny side of Earth. Our home planet gleams below, a majestic whorl of color and texture. All seems calm around you. With no satellites or space debris to dodge, you can just relax and enjoy the black emptiness of space.But looks can be deceiving.In reality, you've unknowingly jumped into an invisible mosh pit of electromagnetic mayhem "” the place in space where a supersonic "wind" of charged particles from the Sun crashes head-on into the...

PALO ALTO, Calif., Aug. 16 /PRNewswire/ -- It has long been known that the Earth's magnetic field provides a protective barrier for life on Earth. As energetic particles stream outward from the Sun in the form of the solar wind, they are deflected by a "force field" created by the Earth's magnetosphere. Now, a team of scientists from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio, Texas, the Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) Space Systems Company Advanced Technology Center (ATC) in Palo...