From its vantage point in geostationary orbit, NASA's GOLD mission – short for Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk – has given scientists a new view of dynamics in Earth's upper atmosphere. Together, three research papers show different ways the upper atmosphere changes unexpectedly, even during relatively mild conditions that aren't typically thought to …
By Mara Johnson-Groh NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Plasma – a fourth state of matter after solid, liquid, and gas where particles have split into charged ions and electrons – is the most common form of matter in the universe. It's somewhat rare on Earth, but it makes up 99% of the matter in the …
By Miles Hatfield NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center About 50 miles up, Earth's atmosphere undergoes a fundamental change. It starts at the atomic level, affecting only one out of every million atoms (but with about 91 billion crammed in a pinhead-sized pocket of air, that's plenty). At that height, unfiltered sunlight begins cleaving atoms into …
By Mara Johnson-Groh NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Up in the night sky, above the auroras and below the Moon, there exists a heated superhighway. Instead of cars though, this transient highway funnels charged particles across hundreds of thousands of miles toward Earth for a few minutes before vanishing. While we can't see it with …
By Mara Johnson-Groh NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center On January 31, 1958, the U.S. launched its first satellite: Explorer 1. Among its many achievements, Explorer 1 made the ground-breaking discovery of belts of charged particles encircling Earth. That discovery is still being studied today. 63 years on, scientists are still learning about these belts – …
By Sarah FrazierNASA's Goddard Space Flight Center A special collection of research in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics highlights the initial accomplishments of NASA's GOLD mission. GOLD, short for Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk, is an ultraviolet imaging spectrograph that observes Earth from its vantage point on a commercial communications satellite …
By Miles Hatfield NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center A new NASA study finds that our distant planetary neighbors, Uranus and Neptune, may have magnetic "seasons:" A time of the year when aurora glow brighter and atmospheric escape may quicken. Study authors Dan Gershman and Gina DiBraccio, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, …
By Karen Fox NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO Download this video This imagery captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory shows a solar flare and a subsequent eruption of solar material that occurred over the left limb of the Sun on November 29, 2020. From its foot point over the …
By Sarah FrazierNASA's Goddard Space Flight Center NASA will begin formulation of a new mission to study Earth's dynamic interface to space: the upper atmosphere. This is a region that is constantly changing, influenced by Earth's weather percolating up from below and space weather — in the form of solar energy and space plasma — …
By Mara Johnson-Groh NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Late on August 16, 2020, the Sun released a burst of light and energy known as a solar flare. This B1-class solar flare – the second smallest class of flare – peaked at 1:26p.m. EDT. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory observes the Aug. 16, 2020, B-class flare at …
