A magnetic portal as capture by the Polar spacecraft (Credits: NASA).
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). MMM incorporates four spacecraft that will surround the portals to study how they work. The mission is scheduled for launch in 2014.
Below, Science@NASA explains how these portals are thought to work:
![A trajectory analysis that used a computational fluid dynamics approach to determine the likely position and velocity histories of the foam (Credits: NASA Ref [1] p61).](https://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/fluid-dynamics-trajectory-analysis-50x50.jpg)
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