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).""

Comments

Not to be confused with the Other THEMIS

[wooferhound]

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.

The Story of the Aurora and Electricity in Space

[pln2bz]

In any discussion of the aurora, one might expect that the name Kristian Birkeland might come up. After all, he was the first scientist to ever accurately describe the phenomenon. It's interesting to look back and see why it is that so few people know who Birkeland is.

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:

A particularly tenacious English mathematician, Sydney Chapman, who was interested in geomagnetism, continually denigrated Birkeland and criticized his work for half a century. Chapman's ideas about auroras involved the kinetic theory of neutral gases and a "dynamo" which he said was driven by tidal flows in Earth's ionosphere. Fifteen years after Birkeland's death, Chapman admitted that plasma from the Sun caused the auroras. But he continued to belittle Birkeland's work.

As late as 1967, Chapman said that Birkeland's "direct observational contributions to auroral knowledge were slight." An American scientist and electrical engineer, Alex Dessler, a former editor of the presigious journal, Geophysical Research Letters, questioned Chapman about Birkeland. "I asked him whether Birkeland's work had any influence on him at all. He glanced at me and said, 'How could it? It was all wrong.'"

With the advent of high altitude rockets and satellite technology, Birkeland's explanation of the aurora was found to be correct. Today Birkeland is acknowledged as having been the first scientist to accurately determine, through heroic observation in the field, laboratory experimentation, and theoretical description, the correct cause of the auroral displays -- electric current from the Sun flowing in plasma and causing that plasma to emit light.

[...]

Lucy Jago says of this pioneer, "Birkeland now has a crater on the Moon named after him, which, together with Birkeland Currents and the wider acceptance of his work, should prevent his memory from fading, but rejection of his theories probably slowed the advance of geomagnetic and auroral physics for nearly half a century."

Hannes Alfven also tried to convince Chapman of Birkeland's reasoning about the aurora:

One of the conflicts in early 20th Century astronomy was between Sydney Chapman and Hannés Alfvén. Alfvén, following Birkeland's lead, believed the auroras to be powered by charged particles from the Sun. Chapman developed a mathematically elegant theory showing that the auroras were generated entirely in the Earth's magnetosphere by buffeting of the solar wind. Chapman refused to give Alfvén's ideas a hearing. At conferences, rather than address particular points of the theory, Chapman would state that he and his colleagues disagreed with Alfvén and that a paper explaining it all was in process. On one occasion, when Chapman was a guest of Alfvén's in Sweden, Alfvén built a replica of Birkeland's terrella experiment, which produced auroras on a magnetized sphere suspended in a vacuum. Alfvén hoped that if Chapman could see how plasma behaves in the laboratory, he would be more amenable to discussing it. Chapman refused to look at the experiment.

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.