NASA | Spacecraft Track Solar Storms From Sun To Earth

NASA's STEREO spacecraft and new data processing techniques have succeeded in tracking space weather events from their origin in the Sun's ultrahot corona to impact with the Earth 96 million miles away, resolving a 40-year mystery about the structure of the structures that cause space weather: how the structures that impact the Earth relate to the corresponding structures in the solar corona.
Despite many instruments that monitor the Sun and a fleet of near-earth probes, the connection between near-Earth disturbances and their counterparts on the Sun has been obscure, because CMEs and the solar wind evolve and change during the 96,000,000 mile journey from the Sun to the Earth.

STEREO includes "heliospheric imager" cameras that monitor the sky at large angles from the Sun, but the starfield and galaxy are 1,000 times brighter than the faint rays of sunlight reflected by free-floating electron clouds inside CMEs and the solar wind; this has made direct imaging of these important structures difficult or impossible, and limited understanding of the connection between space storms and the coronal structures that cause them.

Newly released imagery reveals absolute brightness of detailed features in a large geoeffective CME in late 2008, connecting the original magnetized structure in the Sun's corona to the intricate anatomy of an interplanetary storm as it impacted the Earth three days later. At the time the data were collected, in late 2008, STEREO-A was nearly 45 degrees ahead of the Earth in its orbit, affording a very clear view of the Earth-Sun line.


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[PTNLemay]

I really liked that linear representation of the solar wind around 1:40
That was pretty wicked.

[spikwizflo]

I love the animations in Hd from Nasa, it's like a Science fiction movie

[adastraperaspera]

WOW...great geniuses of the past like Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, and Brahe would have killed to have this information, these images.

We live in an incredible age.

[AnotherPostcard]

Props to Craig DeForest at Goddard for processing STEREO's vast amount of data so well that we can do this!!

[LiquidAffect]

Thank you for posting this video. What a great learning tool!

[AubriGryphon]

@darinka7701 Well, that's a bit of the anthropic principle at work -- if the Earth wasn't protected by a geomagnetic field, and we still existed, we would have adapted to tolerate solar radiation. Therefore, we wouldn't consider CMEs a "danger" any more than you consider molecular oxygen or 1G gravity "dangerous".

[jclu]

CAN SOME ONE TELL ME WHAT KIND OF SCIENTIST/ENGINEER STUDY AND MAKE THESE AWESOME INSTRUMENTS...IM TOTALLY INTERESTED AND WANTED TO DO STUFF LIKE THIS!!!

[AtotheLplusICE]

Stereo is nice, now how about 5.1 Dolby surround??

[scisslehannd]

yay! now we can find out if 2012 is real!

[Gearheaded]

we may be in a "financial recession" but we're still in an age of intellectual revolution! Ten years ago we only knew when these storms hit, now, we can map them across a solar system!

[AubriGryphon]

@darinka7701 We already know life CAN exist under extreme radiation conditions. Deinococcus bacteria, for example. Without our magnetic field it couldn't be "life as we know it", but that's the whole point of the anthropic principal; from the perspective of, say, a hypothetical silicon-based creature native to the moon, we live in a caustic sea of solvents, at such high temperatures that water would vaporize if it wasn't under such crushing pressure.
It's all relative.

[LASTMAN]

I can understand the frustrations of science and right of science equality.

[AnotherPostcard]

@SlightyDisturbedNBK Are you kidding? Anyone who operates even a single satellite should be concerned about this. This means all kinds of private companies (most notably telecommunications) and government organizations (such as the national weather service) benefit from this kind of research and observation (these all benefit economies). And I'm only pointing out the obvious. Solar activity has also played a role in knocking out power grids (which has an even larger impact on economies).

[Raajur]

@theaznfishy Just because they aren't launching anything doesn't mean they aren't relevant anymore...

[dleach]

@SlightyDisturbedNBK Newsflash: we will NEVER get around to doing it then (in your philosophy that things require "money" to exist in order to be done). If there was no debt, there would be no money. Without money, there would be no debt. It's quite obvious, as long as we're using interest-based monetary economics, the amount of debt will ALWAYS surpass that of the actual amount of currency in the global economy at any one time.

[AubriGryphon]

@darinka7701 Ah, so you're starting from the assumption that Earth is special and designed for life. Which is pretty much the exact opposite of my point; it's not that Earth is particularly hospitable for life, but that life here is perfectly developed for this environment. Earth has a magnetic field, so we are not hardened against ionizing radiation. We're unharmed by the dangers of the cosmos because those "dangers" are simply environments different from our own. Until a meteor hits us. Doh!

[abraham]

2:19 Why does Jupiter and Saturn look way bigger than the sun lol?

[mallardhead]

@SlightyDisturbedNBK
"Forewarned is forearmed!"

[Aetrion]

Wait, so these things orbit the sun and not earth?

[bigbadklev]

so basically now we can listen to the sun in stereo instead of mono