By Susannah Darling NASA Headquarters Imagine, if you will, that you are driving to your favorite restaurant. The traffic is bad, so you use your GPS to find the best route. To get your current location, your phone or GPS listens to a satellite in the Earth's upper atmosphere. This satellite sends the GPS system …
By Miles Hatfield NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center On Friday, June 28, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory observed a solar prominence erupting off the limb, or edge, of the Sun. Solar prominences are loops of comparatively cold, dense solar material that become suspended in the Sun's super-hot outer atmosphere. Because they are colder and denser than …
By Miles Hatfield and Lina Tran NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center The solar wind — the hot gas streaming from the Sun — shapes the very space around us. It douses the solar system in a soup of energetic particles and magnetic fields. It sparks aurora on Earth and Jupiter. It has changed the very …
By Sarah Frazier NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center On March 6, 2019, our Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, witnessed a lunar transit — where both the Sun and Moon displayed a little odd behavior. First, there was the transit itself. A lunar transit occurs when the Moon passes between SDO and the Sun, blocking the …
By Tom Bridgman, Ph.D. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio In my nearly 20 years making visualizations at NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio, "Argo Sun"— a simultaneous view of the Sun in various wavelengths of light — is probably one of my favorites. It is not only scientifically useful, but it's one of the …
By Steele Hill NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center NASA's Sun-observing spacecraft produce some pretty breathtaking images of our star — everything from detailed closeups of its surface, to wide-field views of its expansive outer atmosphere. But on occasion, the acrobatics of light that can produce some odd photographic effects. …
By Susannah Darling NASA Headquarters On December 3rd, 2018 the second Miniature X-Ray Solar Spectrometer, MinXSS-2, was launched. MinXSS-2 is a NASA CubeSat designed to study the soft X-ray photons that burst from the Sun during solar flares. Along the way, it may answer a long-standing mystery of what heats up the Sun's atmosphere, the …
By Mara Johnson-Groh NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Space isn't silent. It's abuzz with charged particles that — with the right tools — we can hear. Which is exactly what NASA scientists with the Van Allen Probes mission are doing. The sounds recorded by the mission are helping scientists better understand the dynamic space environment …
By Susannah Darling NASA Headquarters A few weeks ago, the Voyager 2 spacecraft beamed back the first hints that it might soon be leaving the heliosphere — the giant bubble around the Sun filled with its constant outpouring of particles, the solar wind. In the past few days, we have received even more clues to …
By Dr. Tom Bridgman NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center On Oct. 29, 2018, at about 1:04 p.m. EDT, Parker Solar Probe became the closest spacecraft to the Sun, breaking the record of 26.55 million miles from the Sun's surface set by the Helios 2 in April 1976. But this is just the beginning. Parker Solar Probe …
