One of the most challenging aspects of sending humans to Mars is the duration of the flight that takes them there: over 500 days of putting up with the same crewmates while being barraged by cosmic radiation. It’s enough to make anyone stay in Earth orbit. But a group of researchers at the University of Washington is determined to go [...]
Post Tagged with: “magnetic field”
Sunspot Delta Region Ripe for Eruptions
Over the course of 48 hours from February 19th to 20th, a sunspot region of the Sun morphed into a giant sunspot, the size of six Earths. The region, known as AR1678, quickly formed into a delta, an effect where one region is surrounded by another region of opposite magnetic field direction. Such a configuration is highly unstable and prone to [...]
Superconducting Magnets to Protect Spacecraft from Radiation
While on Earth, the planet protects us from space radiation and cosmic rays with its magnetic field. NASA scientists are now working on an analogous approach to protect spacecraft from space radiation outside of Earth’s protective envelope. NASA along with its partners is exploring the possibility of using superconducting magnets to generate magnetic fields around space probes and habitats to [...]
The Van Allen Probes: Honoring the Origins of Magnetospheric Science
Source: NASA/Karen C. Fox Earth’s magnetism has captured human attention since the first innovator noticed that a freely moving piece of magnetized iron would always align itself with Earth’s poles. Throughout most of history, the origins and physics of this magnetism remained mysterious, though by the 20th century certain things had been learned by measuring the magnetic field at Earth’s [...]
Earth’s Magnetosphere Behaves Like a Sieve
Source: ESA ESA’s quartet of satellites studying Earth’s magnetosphere, Cluster, has discovered that our protective magnetic bubble lets the solar wind in under a wider range of conditions than previously believed. Earth’s magnetic field is our planet’s first line of defence against the bombardment of the solar wind. This stream of plasma is launched by the Sun and travels [...]
Canadian Researchers Developed a Body Scanner Suitable for ISS
On September 13, researchers from the University of Saskatchewan introduced a compact Magnetic Resonance Imager (MRI) at the annual conference organized by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). This smaller and cheaper version of the traditional MRI appears to be a suitable new tool to monitor the health of astronauts aboard the ISS and during possible future deep [...]
Tracking Solar Electron Beams
Source: NASA In the quest to understand how the world’s weather moves around the globe, scientists have had to tease apart different kinds of atmospheric movement, such as the great jet streams that can move across a whole hemisphere versus more intricate, localized flows. Much the same must currently be done to understand the various motions at work in the [...]
Scientists Measure Coronal Loop Plasma Speeds
An international team of scientists has observed the movement of gases at one million degrees Kelvin in a coronal loop. These new observations were made from the Hinode satellite, formerly Solar-B, a joint ESA, NASA, JAXA and UK satellite launched in 2006. “Active regions are now occurring frequently across the Sun,” said Dr. Helen Mason from the University of Cambridge’s Department [...]
Solar Ultraviolet Magnetograph Investigation to Launch July 5th
Source: NASA On July 5, NASA will launch a mission called the Solar Ultraviolet Magnetograph Investigation or SUMI, to study the intricate, constantly changing magnetic fields on the sun in a hard-to-observe area of the sun’s low atmosphere called the chromosphere. Magnetic fields, and the intense magnetic energy they help marshal, lie at the heart of how the sun can [...]
X-point Portals Connect Earth to Sun
Physicist Jack Scudder of the University of Iowa has discovered portals in Earth’s magnetic field that create intermittent pathways to the sun’s atmosphere. When open, these portals streamline transportation of high energy particles to Earth’s magnetosphere, causing geomagnetic storms. Scudder’s discovery, made using data from NASA’s THEMIS and Polar and ESA’s Cluster probes, will assist the upcoming Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMM). [...]
