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 …
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 …
By Sarah Frazier NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center This image of comet NEOWISE was captured by NASA's Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory, or STEREO, on June 24, 2020, as the comet approached the Sun. The comet was visible in the field of view of STEREO's Heliospheric Imager because of a special observing campaign: STEREO underwent …
A SHOT IN THE DARK Chasing the aurora from the world's northernmost rocket range Part VII I • II • III • IV • V • VI • VII Three months later, the science team convened at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. Button-up shirts replaced down coats, their hair not ruffled from beanies and headlamps. But the …
