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The Sun Spot

    What Is a TID? It’s a TAD More Complicated Than We Thought

    infographic showing the layers of the atmosphere including the ionosphere, as well as the red, green and UV airglow

    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 …

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    NASA’s TWINS Data Reveals Heated Particle Highway to Earth

    Data from NASA's TWINS and a computer model show how particles are funneled through Earth's magnetosphere.

    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 …

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    63 Years after Explorer 1, New Discoveries about the Van Allen Belts Continue

    Visualization of the two concentric donut-shaped Van Allen belts encircling Earth

    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 – …

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    Research Highlights from NASA’s GOLD Mission

    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 …

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    What Spring is like on Uranus and Neptune

    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, …

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    SDO Captures Brilliant Solar Eruption

    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 …

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    Mission to study space weather moves into formulation

    Data visualization showing Earth with two bands of dense plasma near the equator, complex upper atmospheric winds, and Earth's magnetic field like a belt near the middle of the planet.

    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 — …

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    Small-Class Flare Seen on the Sun

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    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 …

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    Comet NEOWISE Seen in an Aurora-Filled Sky

    Comet NEOWISE is visible in a sky filled with purple and green aurora

    Comet NEOWISE is visible in an aurora-filled sky in this photo by Aurorasaurus Ambassador Donna Lach. The photo was taken early on July 14, 2020, in western Manitoba, Canada. The purple ribbon-like structure to the left is STEVE, an aurora-related phenomenon discovered with the help of citizen scientists working with the Aurorasaurus project. The bright …

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