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    solar wind tagged posts

    Multitasking New Horizons observed Solar Wind changes on journey to Pluto

    April 6, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Space environment data collected by New Horizons over a billion miles of its journey to Pluto will play a key role in testing and improving models of the space environment throughout the solar system. This visualization is one example of such a model: It shows the simulated space environment out to Pluto a few months before New Horizons’ closest approach. Drawn over the model is the path of New Horizons up to 2015, as well as the current direction of the two Voyager spacecraft – which are currently at three or four times New Horizons’ distance from the sun. The solar wind that New Horizons encountered will reach the Voyager spacecraft about a year later. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, the Space Weather Research Center (SWRC) and the Community-Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC), Enlil and Dusan Odstrcil (GMU)

    Space environment data collected by New Horizons over a billion miles of its journey to Pluto will play a key role in testing and improving models of the space environment throughout the solar system. This visualization is one example of such a model: It shows the simulated space environment out to Pluto a few months before New Horizons’ closest approach. Drawn over the model is the path of New Horizons up to 2015, as well as the current direction of the two Voyager spacecraft – which are currently at three or four times New Horizons’ distance from the sun. The solar wind that New Horizons encountered will reach the Voyager spacecraft about a year later...

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    Solar Storms Trigger Jupiter’s ‘Northern Lights’ by generating a new X-ray Aurora 8X brighter than normal

    March 23, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Artistic rendering of Jupiter's magnetosphere. Credit: JAXA

    Artistic rendering of Jupiter’s magnetosphere. Credit: JAXA

    It is hundreds of times more energetic than Earth’s aurora borealis, finds new UCL-led research using NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory. It is the first time that Jupiter’s X-ray aurora has been studied when a giant storm from the Sun has arrived at the planet. The dramatic findings complement NASA’s Juno mission this summer which aims to understand the relationship between the two biggest structures in the solar system – the region of space controlled by Jupiter’s magnetic field (i.e. its magnetosphere) and that controlled by the solar wind.

    “There’s a constant power struggle between the solar wind and Jupiter’s magnetosphere. We want to understand this interaction and what effect it has on the planet...

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    NASA’s first Wide-Field Soft X-ray Camera is a Gift that keeps Giving

    March 9, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space, Physics

    The miniaturized CubeSat payload called both CuPID and WASP returned data about a physical phenomenon called charge exchange. Credit: NASA

    The miniaturized CubeSat payload called both CuPID and WASP returned data about a physical phenomenon called charge exchange. Credit: NASA

    The camera, which incorporated a never-before-flown focusing technology when it debuted in late 2012, is a gift that keeps giving. NASA recently selected a miniaturized version of the original X-ray camera to fly as a CubeSat mission to study Earth’s magnetic cusps – regions in the magnetic cocoon around our planet near the poles where the magnetic field lines dip down toward the ground...

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    NASA’s LADEE Spacecraft finds Neon in Lunar Atmosphere

    August 18, 2015, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Artist’s concept of NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft in orbit above the moon. Credit: NASA Ames / Dana Berry

    Artist’s concept of NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft in orbit above the moon. Credit: NASA Ames / Dana Berry

    The presence of neon in the exosphere of the moon has been a subject of speculation since the Apollo missions, but no credible detections were made till now. There’s not enough neon to make the moon visibly glow because the moon’s atmosphere is extremely tenuous, about 100 trillion times less dense than Earth’s atmosphere at sea level. A dense atmosphere like Earth’s is relatively rare in our solar system because an object has to be sufficiently massive to have enough gravity to hold onto it.

    The behavior of a dense atmosphere is driven by collisions between its atoms and molecules...

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