Earth's Polar Light Show Welcome to the next stop on the solar tour! Auroras are the bright lights seen at Earth's north and south poles. Energy and particles from the Sun travel to Earth and interact with our planet's magnetic field. This interaction causes the colorful lights seen in auroras. Meet STEVE People around the …
Earth's Interface to Space Welcome to Earth's upper atmosphere, where things get weird. Home to: Earth's hottest (4,500 degrees F) AND coldest (-120 degrees F) temperatures 50 tons of incoming meteors, daily Air that is literally electric Satellite communications The ionosphere Lucky for us, the Sun's most harmful rays don't reach the ground. Instead they're …
A Total Solar Eclipse in Antarctica! Early this morning, there was a total solar eclipse across Antarctica! During a total solar eclipse, the Moon blocks out the Sun, creating the illusion of night during the day and a breathtaking sight in our sky. Join NASA Edge at 1:30 p.m. EST on NASA TV to see …
Greetings from Earth! Our solar tour begins on Earth. From here, one star shines brighter than all the rest. It's the closest star and the center of our solar system: our Sun. Earth is in the Goldilocks zone, just the right distance from the Sun to be habitable. A mission to touch the Sun We …
Welcome to NASA's #SolarTour! The Sun has an immense influence in space. It shapes and impacts our entire solar system in ways that we are still trying to understand. To help unravel some of the Sun's biggest mysteries, NASA launched Parker Solar Probe in 2018 to study the Sun up close. This year, the mission …
By Miles Hatfield NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center New results from NASA satellite data show that space weather – the changing conditions in space driven by the Sun – can heat up Earth's hottest and highest atmospheric layer. The findings, published in July in Geophysical Research Letters, used data from NASA's Global Observations of the …
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 …
