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According to NASA, Jack Scudder—a researcher at the University of Iowa—has found "hidden portals on Earth's magnetic field [that] open and close dozens of times each day." Some of them are open for long periods of time.
Scudder says that these portals "create an uninterrupted path leading from our own planet to the sun's atmosphere 93 million miles away."
Called X-points or electron diffusion regions, they are located "a few tens of thousands of kilometers from Earth. The portals are created through a process of magnetic reconnection in which lines of magnetic force from both celestial bodies mingle and criss-cross through space. The criss-crossing creates these x-points.
The portals are "invisible, unstable and elusive," opening and closing without any warning. When they open, however, they are capable of transporting energetic particles at high speed from the Sun's atmosphere's to Earth's, causing geomagnetic storms.
NASA is getting ready such a spacecraft in their Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission. A whole squadron of them: four ships that will be deployed around Earth and "surround the portals to observe how they work." The spacecraft will launch in 2014.
Originally posted by Raivan31
If NASA is going to that much trouble then they must be very, very interesting and potentially important to science. NASA does not simply pour millions of dollars toward something that doesn't interest the government and the only things the government are usually interested in are staying a government and weapons..... so........
Originally posted by forall2see
Originally posted by Raivan31
If NASA is going to that much trouble then they must be very, very interesting and potentially important to science. NASA does not simply pour millions of dollars toward something that doesn't interest the government and the only things the government are usually interested in are staying a government and weapons..... so........
Or they are curious about how our planet works and hope that some day we will have enough understanding of our planet to do off the wall things, such as create abundant solar energy.
Not all people in power are bad. There are about 4 good ones...edit on 7/4/2012 by forall2see because: (no reason given)
Originally posted by Raivan31
My point is not to suggest that some evil conspiracy is afoot (perish the thought ) but that the implications of this discovery must be pretty damned important if they are prepared to put four spacecraft up there at once.
When was the last time NASA put that much equipment up there?
By observing magnetic reconnection in nature, MMS provides access to predictive knowledge of a universal process that is the final governor of space weather, affecting modern technological systems such as communications networks, GPS navigation, and electrical power grids. MMS will establish knowledge, methods and technologies applicable to future space weather missions and the future growth and development of space weather forecasting.
Originally posted by forall2see
Originally posted by Raivan31
If NASA is going to that much trouble then they must be very, very interesting and potentially important to science. NASA does not simply pour millions of dollars toward something that doesn't interest the government and the only things the government are usually interested in are staying a government and weapons..... so........
Or they are curious about how our planet works and hope that some day we will have enough understanding of our planet to do off the wall things, such as create abundant solar energy.
Not all people in power are bad. There are about 4 good ones...edit on 7/4/2012 by forall2see because: (no reason given)
Originally posted by Phage
reply to post by Raivan31
$683 million. The only "investors" are us.
By observing magnetic reconnection in nature, MMS provides access to predictive knowledge of a universal process that is the final governor of space weather, affecting modern technological systems such as communications networks, GPS navigation, and electrical power grids. MMS will establish knowledge, methods and technologies applicable to future space weather missions and the future growth and development of space weather forecasting.
mms.gsfc.nasa.gov...
Not much to be gained. Except learning about things that have the potential to have a huge impact on our technologically dependent society.
edit on 7/4/2012 by Phage because: (no reason given)
What happened was that a series of so-called magnetic flux tubes swept past the satellites again and again. These tubes are channels created by the merging of the Earth and Sun's magnetic fields.
One end of the tube is connected to Earth, and the other to the full force of the solar wind, and so they allow solar particles to penetrate the normally protective magnetosphere. When this happens, physicists say there has been a Flux Transfer Event. It is also known as magnetic reconnection.
The phenomenon has been known to exist for many years, but what is interesting about the day in May 2004, is that the same location underwent magnetic reconnection several times. And the satellites were there to watch it.
The data from the five spacecraft enabled scientists in France, led by Aurélie Marchaudon of the Université d'Orléans, to triangulate the location of the magnetic reconnection region, and to deduce its size.
They found that the reconnection site was on the daylight west side of the Earth's magnetic shield and was around 25000 kilometres across.
Later, Jean Berchem of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and his team, conducted computer simulations that confirmed the observational data.