space weather tagged posts

An artist’s rendering of the Van Allen radiation belts surrounding Earth. The purple, concentric shells represent the inner and outer belts. They completely encircle Earth, but have been cut away in this image to show detail.CREDIT: NASA’s Conceptual Image Lab/Walt Feimer

Predicting ‘killer’ electrons in the Earth’s outer radiation belt protects spacecraft. A new, first-of-its-kind space weather model reliably predicts space storms of high-energy particles that are harmful to many satellites and spacecraft orbiting in the Earth’s outer radiation belt...

Human activities have been changing near-Earth space and weather. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Genna Duberstein

Our Cold War history is now offering scientists a chance to better understand the complex space system that surrounds us. Space weather – which can include changes in Earth’s magnetic environment – are usually triggered by the sun’s activity, but recently declassified data on high-altitude nuclear explosion tests have provided a new look at the mechanisms that set off perturbations in that magnetic system. Such information can help support NASA’s efforts to protect satellites and astronauts from the natural radiation inherent in space.

From 1958 to 1962, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. ran high-altitude tests with exotic code names like Starfish, Argus and Teak...

Watch the evolution of a stealth CME in this simulation. Differential rotation creates a twisted mass of magnetic fields on the sun, which then pinches off and speeds out into space. The image of the sun is from NASA’s STEREO. Colored lines depict magnetic field lines, and the different colors indicate in which layers of the sun’s atmosphere they originate. The white lines become stressed and form a coil, eventually erupting from the sun. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/ARMS/Joy Ng, producer

A kind of solar storm has puzzled scientists for its lack of typical warning signs: They seem to come from nowhere, and scientists call them stealth CMEs. Now, scientists have developed a model simulating their evolution...

Coronal BP detection at three distinct vantage points in space. BP detections by the STEREO and SDO spacecraft taken around 00:00 UT on 2 February 2011 when the entire solar corona could first be seen by all three spacecraft. The top row (a–c) shows coronal images from a plasma formed around 1.5 MK. The small bright concentrations seen in these images are BPs. The bottom row (d–f) shows the same images with respective BP detections15 shown in red (STEREO-Behind), white (SDO) and blue (STEREO-Ahead).

Waves may influence space weather, offer a source of predictability...