Apr 5 2005
From The Space Library
NASA announced that scientists analyzing images from the its Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellite (POES) and from the Imager for Magnetopause to Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) spacecraft had discovered that Earth's northern and southern auroras are not mirror images of each other, as previously thought. Images from the two spacecraft showed that auroras move and change, depending on the tilt of Earth's magnetic field toward the Sun and on solar wind conditions. Knowing more about how auroras react to the solar wind could help scientists predict space weather. Timothy J. Stubbs of the Laboratory for Extraterrestrial Physics at NASA's GSFC remarked that the analysis was the first to track the locations of the auroras using simultaneous observations, in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, of the auroras in their entirety. (NASA, “NASA Study Finds Earth's Auroras Are Not Mirror Images,” news release 05-089, 5 April 2005, http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2005/apr/HQ_05089_aurora_images.html (accessed 29 June 2009).)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
