magnetic reconnection tagged posts

The red ellipses show the MMS orbit paths during the first and second phases of the mission. Each spacecraft uses GPS signals – which come from satellites situated along the green circle shown surrounding Earth — from the far side of Earth to track its position. Credits: NASA/MMS

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 set the record at 43,500 miles above the surface. The four MMS spacecraft incorporate GPS measurements into their precise tracking systems, which require extremely sensitive position and orbit calculations to guide tight flying formations.

Earlier this year, MMS achieved the closest flying s...

The GRAPES-3 muon telescope, the largest and most sensitive cosmic ray monitor recorded a burst of galactic cosmic rays that indicated a crack in the Earth’s magnetic shield. Credit: TIFR

The GRAPES-3 muon telescope located at TIFR’s Cosmic Ray Laboratory in Ooty recorded a burst of galactic cosmic rays of about 20 GeV, on 22 June 2015 lasting for 2 hours. The burst occurred when a giant cloud of plasma ejected from the solar corona, and moving with a speed of about 2.5 million km/h struck our planet, causing a severe compression of Earth’s magnetosphere from 11 to 4 times the radius of Earth. It triggered a severe geomagnetic storm that generated aurora borealis, and radio signal blackouts in many high latitude countries.

Earth’s magnetosphere extends over a radius of a million kilometers...

(a) The trajectory of the electron #1 in the 3D velocity space. (b) A conceptual model of the noncrossing electron orbits. A noncrossing Speiser orbit (solid line) and a noncrossing regular orbit (red). They are computed in a configuration similar to the traditional Speiser orbit (dashed line) in Figure 1. (c) The velocity-space trajectory of the noncrossing Speiser orbit for y < 0 and z < 1.5.

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 the topology of the magnetic field lines...

This artist’s rendition shows the four identical MMS spacecraft flying near the sun-facing boundary of Earth’s magnetic field (blue wavy lines). The MMS mission has revealed the clearest picture yet of the process of magnetic reconnection between the magnetic fields of Earth and the sun — a driving force behind space weather, solar flares and other energetic phenomena. Credit: NASA

A new study provides the first major results of NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission. The paper describes the first direct and detailed observation of magnetic reconnection, which occurs when 2 opposing magnetic field lines break and reconnect with each other, releasing massive amounts of energy. The discovery is a major milestone in understanding magnetism and space weather.

Evidence suggests reconnec...