Yahoo News A Group of Scientists Want to Launch a Satellite to Make an Artificial Aurora
The Northern Lights are more than just a spectacle; they can indicate changes in our planet’s magnetic field and potential threats from solar flares. But how much more can an aurora tell us? To find the answer, a group of scientists wants to launch a satellite that will allow them to do the only thing that will allow them to fully understand such a giant, amorphous, ever-changing phenomenon: create one.
But what exactly will they be creating?
Here's how auroras work: The Earth’s atmosphere is filled with layers. The bottom layer-where we live most of our lives-is called the troposphere. Above that is the stratosphere, the domain of aircraft and high-altitude balloons. Above that is the ionosphere, which is the highest layer of our atmosphere and sits at the border between our planet and space. This is where high-energy cosmic rays collide with our atmosphere and the Northern Lights appear.
Above even the ionosphere sits the Earth’s magnetosphere, which is an area fully in space that marks the border of Earth’s magnetic field. In this region between the Earth’s atmosphere and space exist extremely complicated interactions between the magnetosphere, the ionosphere, and particles from the Sun.
When the Sun emits solar material, for instance during a solar flare or as part of the solar wind, those particles fly through space until they hit the Earth’s magnetosphere. The magnetosphere distorts under the pressure from this solar material, bringing it in contact with the ionosphere. When that happens, the entire atmosphere lights up with auroras, commonly referred to as the Northern or Southern Lights.
While scientists understand this much, the actual details of how the magnetosphere creates auroras is mostly a mystery. Think of the auroras in the ionosphere as like a projection of the magnetosphere: when a particle from the Sun hits the magnetosphere, it lights up a corresponding part of the ionosphere with an aurora.
However, there’s no way to tell which part of the magnetosphere corresponds with which part of the ionosphere.
That's what an upcoming satellite experiment is designed to figure out. The CONNection EXplorer-or CONNEX for short-will, with any luck, finally bridge the gap between the ionosphere and the magnetosphere and allow scientists to draw clearer connections between the auroras we see on Earth and behavior and events that occur in space.
CONNEX is in the very early stages of development, and the team of scientists working on the project-from half a dozen universities, a handful of national labs, and a few private institutions-are currently working on a NASA proposal. If they’re successful, CONNEX will join other recent NASA-funded missions like WISE and TESS.
The key is drawing a connection between the magnetosphere and the ionosphere. “We maybe see very interesting dynamics [in the magnetosphere] and we see very interesting dynamics [in the ionosphere],” says CONNEX team member Gian Luca Delzanno, of Los Alamos National Laboratory. “But we cannot really say whether one is the cause of the other simply because we do not know where those phenomena [in the magnetosphere] map to in the ionosphere.”
CONNEX consists mainly of a satellite that will fire electron particles at the planet. Those particles will be captured by the magnetosphere and make it to the ionosphere as an artificial aurora. Because we know exactly where those particles are hitting the magnetosphere, CONNEX lets us map different parts of the ionosphere to different parts of the magnetosphere.
With that information, we can use auroras to determine what’s going on with the magnetosphere, which is important because the magnetosphere can seriously affect the operation of spacecraft and satellites.
“If that was possible then we could say, ‘Maybe something else is happening away from the Earth and some spacecraft could be in danger, so let's shut them off,’” says Delzanno.
CONNEX is only the first step, but if it takes off, scientists could unlock a whole new way to study the space around the Earth.
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