NASA Spacecraft Make New Discoveries About Northern Lights

A fleet of NASA spacecraft, launched less than eight months ago, has made three important discoveries about spectacular eruptions of Northern Lights called
"substorms" and the source of their power.

NASA's Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) mission observed the dynamics of a rapidly developing substorm, confirmed the existence of giant magnetic ropes and witnessed small explosions in the outskirts of Earth's magnetic field. The findings will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco in December.

The discoveries began on March 23, when a substorm erupted over Alaska and Canada, producing vivid auroras for more than two hours. A network of ground cameras organized to support THEMIS photographed the display from below while the satellites measured particles and fields from above.

"The substorm behaved quite unexpectedly," says Vassilis Angelopoulos, the mission's principal investigator at the University of California, Los Angeles. "The auroras surged westward twice as fast as anyone thought possible, crossing 15 degrees of longitude in less than one minute. The storm traversed an entire polar time zone, or 400 miles, in 60 seconds flat."

Watch more breaking news now on our video feed:





Bookmark http://universeeverything.blogspot.com/ and drop back in sometime.

Scientists Clean Up Sea Floor for Earth Day

Residents at Palmer Station, a year-round U.S. research station on the Antarctic Peninsula, removed old debris from the sea floor near the station in late April, as a part of an annual Earth Day clean up.

In the early days of Antarctic exploration, in the first decades of the 20th century, expeditions were largely unregulated and free to dispose of wastes as the leaders saw fit. In the latter half of the century, following renewed efforts to explore the polar regions that were sparked in part by worldwide interest in the continent and a burgeoning, global environmental consciousness, nations began to develop environmental policies for Antarctica as well as efforts to mitigate past environmental harm.

The international Antarctic Treaty, to which the United States is a signatory, contains a Protocol on Environmental Protection that designates Antarctica as a "natural reserve, devoted to peace and science," and sets forth basic principles and detailed, environment-related obligations applicable to human activities in Antarctica.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) oversees the U.S. Antarctic Program, which manages three year-round stations on the southernmost continent and coordinates all U.S. scientific research there.

Bookmark http://universeeverything.blogspot.com/ and drop back in sometime.