MMS Stories
For decades, scientists have thought that there is a ceiling to how intensely Earth responds to solar storms. However, a NASA-led paper published Wednesday in Nature suggests this upper limit is an illusion. If so, it means solar storms could…
One year on, NASA scientists are still making huge discoveries about the largest geomagnetic storm to hit Earth in two decades, the Gannon storm. The findings are helping us better understand and prepare for the ways in which the Sun’s…
Since its launch on March 12, 2015, NASA’s MMS, or Magnetospheric Multiscale, mission has been rewriting our understanding of a key physical process that is important across the universe, from black holes to the Sun to Earth’s protective magnetic field.…
In just minutes, a flare on the Sun can release enough energy to power the whole world for 20,000 years. An explosive process called magnetic reconnection triggers these solar flares, and scientists have spent the last half-century trying to understand…
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.…