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NASA to Launch Magnetic Storm Probes
eldavojohn writes "The aurora borealis (also known as the Northern Lights) has long been known to be an effect resulting from the Sun's solar wind pushing particles into the earth's magnetic field and atmosphere. In light of the possible danger that these substorms could pose to astronauts & equipment, NASA is now planning a mission to track down these magnetic storms and disturbances. The program's not so catchy name of Time History of Events and Macroscale Interaction during Substorms has a slightly catchier acronym of THEMIS. From the article, "In order to scan the Earth's magnetic field and pinpoint the origin of substorms, THEMIS researchers plan to stagger their spacecraft in different orbits that range in altitude from 10 to 30 times the radius of the Earth (the planet's radius is about 3,962 miles, or 6,378 kilometers).""
The aurora borealis (also known as the Northern Lights) has long been known to be an effect resulting from the Sun's solar wind pushing particles into the earth's magnetic field and atmosphere.
No, aurora borealis is caused when Homer Simpson attempts to cook a meal at Principal Skinner's house.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
I know there is a good joke here somewhere, I just can't think of it. What the hell is a Magentic storm probe? Is this like when the magenta toner explodes in a laser printer?
She's the ancient Greek Goddess of "The Law of Nature" or "Judgement".
Has anyone bothered to fly into the aurora borealis with, like, some sensors strapped to fuselage? Seems kinda like one of the first things you'd try once you had a plane that could fly up to high altitudes.. surely someone has sent weather baloons into the aurora borealis. Of course, it would be piss funny if it turns out that outfitting an X1 era plane with a magnetic field generator and flying it into the aurora borealis gave it some sort of magnetic boost, like riding a wave, and this was fast enough to enter orbit.
How we know is more important than what we know.
"THEMIS Probes" might not sound all that exciting, but its a big upgrade from the old name.
For a long time the sattelites were called the "Aurora National Atmospheric Layer Probes", but the acronym
"ANAL Probes" was just too hard to take seriously.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
"In order to scan the Earth's magnetic field and pinpoint the origin of substorms, THEMIS researchers plan to stagger their spacecraft in different orbits that range in altitude from 10 to 30 times the radius of the Earth (the planet's radius is about 3,962 miles, or 6,378 kilometers)."
:)
Due to what happened with the Mars Polar Lander could we get those figures in just one measurement system, if for no other reason just to avoid possible confusion and the possibility of sending a spacecraft hurtling into the surface of a planet I live on? Thanks.
FYI title of article should read magnetic not magentic.
THEMIS - Either way you say the word, your friends will laugh at you. Try it!
I would have preferred calling the mission "The Solar Windsock" but I guess that just blows.
s/magentic/magenta/
There, fixed it for ya.
It must be trying to detect ultraViolet waves.
I heard that they were planning on sending a team led by Dr. Reed Richards to follow up on this project's findings. The team will consist of somewhere between three and five people.
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
What's a magentic Storm?
You just know they think up the name first (THEMIS), then think up words to make a vaguely sciencey phrase to fit it ( Time History of Events and Macroscale Interaction during Substorms ) and then have to sit around wondering what a mission with such a name would actually do. Quite clearly one of the people involved wanted a mission involving time travel but they just ended up with investigating solar wind storms.
If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done?
What's a Magentic when it's at home? Is it related to Magellan?
Maybe they meant 'electrical storm', not 'magentic' ... magnetism is the direct, and only direct result of current flow. Must've forgotten their yr 12 physics.
_
\\/ are accustomed' - First Lensman
nope dudes i just don't see that happening! kardinal von muna, who claims that he's an expert of this matter told me that this just won't see the daylight.
THEMIS (pronounced thee mis)? Given NASA failure to hit the target, maybe Borealis Lights Identification Navigation Drone And Sensing Aura Borealis Array Battery (B.L.I.N.D.A.S.A.B.A.T) See there is a good joke...
But don't confuse this THEMIS with the Other THEMIS
http://themis.la.asu.edu/
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) was developed by Arizona State University, Tempe, in collaboration with Raytheon Santa Barbara Remote Sensing. The THEMIS investigation is led by Dr. Philip Christensen at Arizona State University. Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, is the prime contractor for the Odyssey project, and developed and built the orbiter. Mission operations are conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin and from JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
We just launched STEREO not too long ago and both satellites are imaging the Sun in a number of wavelengths. One of the points of the mission is to image coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which are the source of the charged particles which cause aurora.
a pr_2m.htm
CMEs can cause serious trouble:
-fry power grids on Earth
-interfere with instruments/avionics on airplanes
-lethal radiation dosage for astronauts
-damage satellites
-...
Pretty fisheye image of an aurora from a CME in 2004.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap041109.html
STEREO homepage:
http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/
http://www.spacescience.com/headlines/y2000/ast07
Birkeland's paper on the aurora, based in part on his brave journey to Northern Norway through 24-hour darkness and temperatures low enough that he nearly died on the trip, marked the first time that anybody (specifically British scientists) decided to start ostracizing the concept of electricity in space. Their legacy of ridiculing electricity in space would continue on for generations to the present day.
The story of the rejection of electricity in space sounds strikingly similar to the situation that persists today when electricity is implicated in anything that has to do with our space observations. From Don Scott's The Electric Sky:
Hannes Alfven also tried to convince Chapman of Birkeland's reasoning about the aurora:
Few people that ridicule Electric Universe Theory and Plasma Cosmology today realize that they follow in the footsteps of the confident Sydney Chapman. After all, how would they know about the story? Few people today, including NASA's discussion of this probe on their website, link the name Kristian Birkeland to the aurora.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
I really hate to nitpick here, since your post was one of the very few intelligent
ones in this dicussion. However, it is not a surprise to me that you could not find Kristian Birkeland's name mentioned anywhere on the THEMIS web site.
Birkeland's story just happens to be interesting enough that someone wrote a popular book about his arctic adventures. I have heard from several scientists that Lucy Jago's book about Birkeland is an interesting read, but that she does not get everything exactly right and there may be some exaggerations about certain events in the book. I have not read Lucy Jago's book, but I have looked at the orginal book that Birkeland published about his expeditions. While Birkeland was one of the first people to realize what the actual cause of the aurora borealis might be, he did not correctly understand all of the details. Since the dawn of the space age, scientists around the world have been using sounding rockets and satellites to better understand the processes that cause the aurora and fill in the details that Birkeland was unable to understand from his ground-based observations. Most of these people get very little credit or public acknowledgement of their work, even though they have advanced our understanding of the Sun, the Earth's magnetic field, the ionosphere, and the aurora significantly since Birkeland's time. Maybe it would have been nice if they had mentioned Birkeland on the THEMIS web site, but there are probably a lot of other notable space scientists that they didn't mention either.
Also, from what I know about THEMIS, I don't think that most scientists would actually describe it as an "auroral" mission. The perigees of the THEMIS satellites are about 1-2 Earth radii, which would be close enough to do auroral work if it was in a polar orbit. However, I thought that THEMIS was in a mainly equatorial orbit (someone please correct me if I'm wrong!). The apogees of the THEMIS satellites are between 12 and 34 Earth radii which put them in a great position to study a region of the Earth's magnetosphere called the magnetotail. Some pretty interesting processes that ultimately result in energy being dumped into the Earth' ionosphere during auroral displays start in the magnetotail. Unfortunately, while thinking about things like magnetic reconnection, magnetic field dipolarizations, current disruption, and substorm current systems gets anyone with a Ph.D. in plasma physics excited, they probably don't mean much of anything to the general public. These topics are not exactly covered in high school science courses, or even most college science courses, as they require a lot of math. The people who put together the NASA press releases and the THEMIS outreach site probably decided to focus on the things that a lay person might understand and would be interested in, which are the connections between the magnetic field and the aurora. A lot of people don't even know about the aurora borealis because they have never seen it themselves. I'm sure that the THEMIS team (and the people involved with any other mission of this type) found it was pretty hard to explain the mission science and why it is important to the public because the general public really knows very little at all about this sort of thing.
From the THEMIS web site:
Themis, the goddess of justice, wisdom and good counsel, the guardian of oaths in Greek mythology, represents the THEMIS mission. She will confirm without prejudice, as implied by her fame, one of the two competing theories for auroral eruptions. THEMIS, with her sword (representing instruments) and scales (representing science discoveries), has both power and impartiality.
Basically, the scientists chose this name because they are hoping their mission will help resolve some of the major controversies in magnetospheric physics thanks to it's advanced instruments and multi-spacecraft approach. They also probably realized it would make a good acronym. Thinking up a catchy acronym for a NASA mission is much harder than you think!
Your point is very well taken. In researching the publications on this mission, I noticed myself that it was really difficult to understand what was the real purpose of the mission. I remain quite confused.
...
I'm interested in something else that you mentioned
Some pretty interesting processes that ultimately result in energy being dumped into the Earth' ionosphere during auroral displays start in the magnetotail. Unfortunately, while thinking about things like magnetic reconnection, magnetic field dipolarizations, current disruption, and substorm current systems gets anyone with a Ph.D. in plasma physics excited, they probably don't mean much of anything to the general public.
I'm specifically interested in what you think of magnetic reconnections. I'm not a physicist, but I spend a lot of time trying to understand issues related to electricity and plasma in space. Don Scott devotes an entire chapter in his book to the concept of magnetic reconnections and his arguments against the science of reconnections seems strong. I obviously cannot excerpt an entire chapter, but I was wondering what you think of the science behind it. It's interesting to me that Alfven was so against the idea and yet it's such a mainstream concept today. What did Alfven see that others today do not? Or to the contrary, what observations have been made since that have confirmed the idea?
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
Did no one ever watch Farscape? Wormholes, baby. Slingshot to another galaxy. Sounds like a wicked ride to me.
Mark Anthony Collins
"The mechanisms for the aurora and other processes are very powerful producing electrical currents at the highest levels ever seen."
You-- and "Thunderbolts"-- want to argue that EM rather than gravity shapes EVEN PLANETARY systems, yet, the aurora borealis is the most powerful electric current observed? The aurora is entirely local to earth!
Hello? The "Thunderbolts" claim that INTERPLANETARY electric arcs shape planets. Surely we would have observed one by now?