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By Space Force
The exercise was designed to prepare S4S for its wartime mission and involved tailored participation from subordinate units to refine and validate S4S’s organizational concepts of operational employment.
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By NASA
6 Min Read NASA Discovers a Long-Sought Global Electric Field on Earth
The geographic North Pole seen from the Endurance rocket ship at 477 miles (768 kilometers) altitude above the Arctic. The faint red and green streaks at the top of the image are artifacts of lens flare. Credits: NASA Key Points
A rocket team reports the first successful detection of Earth’s ambipolar electric field: a weak, planet-wide electric field as fundamental as Earth’s gravity and magnetic fields. First hypothesized more than 60 years ago, the ambipolar electric field is a key driver of the “polar wind,” a steady outflow of charged particles into space that occurs above Earth’s poles. This electric field lifts charged particles in our upper atmosphere to greater heights than they would otherwise reach and may have shaped our planet’s evolution in ways yet to be explored.
Using observations from a NASA suborbital rocket, an international team of scientists has, for the first time, successfully measured a planet-wide electric field thought to be as fundamental to Earth as its gravity and magnetic fields. Known as the ambipolar electric field, scientists first hypothesized over 60 years ago that it drove how our planet’s atmosphere can escape above Earth’s North and South Poles. Measurements from the rocket, NASA’s Endurance mission, have confirmed the existence of the ambipolar field and quantified its strength, revealing its role in driving atmospheric escape and shaping our ionosphere — a layer of the upper atmosphere — more broadly.
Understanding the complex movements and evolution of our planet’s atmosphere provides clues not only to the history of Earth but also gives us insight into the mysteries of other planets and determining which ones might be hospitable to life. The paper was published Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2024, in the journal Nature.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Lacey Young
Download this video and related animations from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio. An Electric Field Drawing Particles Out to Space
Since the late 1960s, spacecraft flying over Earth’s poles have detected a stream of particles flowing from our atmosphere into space. Theorists predicted this outflow, which they dubbed the “polar wind,” spurring research to understand its causes.
Some amount of outflow from our atmosphere was expected. Intense, unfiltered sunlight should cause some particles from our air to escape into space, like steam evaporating from a pot of water. But the observed polar wind was more mysterious. Many particles within it were cold, with no signs they had been heated — yet they were traveling at supersonic speeds.
“Something had to be drawing these particles out of the atmosphere,” said Glyn Collinson, principal investigator of Endurance at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the paper. Scientists suspected a yet-to-be-discovered electric field could be at work.
The hypothesized electric field, generated at the subatomic scale, was expected to be incredibly weak, with its effects felt only over hundreds of miles. For decades, detecting it was beyond the limits of existing technology. In 2016, Collinson and his team got to work inventing a new instrument they thought was up to the task of measuring Earth’s ambipolar field.
Launching a Rocket from the Arctic
The team’s instruments and ideas were best suited for a suborbital rocket flight launched from the Arctic. In a nod to the ship that carried Ernest Shackleton on his famous 1914 voyage to Antarctica, the team named their mission Endurance. The scientists set a course for Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago just a few hundred miles from the North Pole and home to the northernmost rocket range in the world.
“Svalbard is the only rocket range in the world where you can fly through the polar wind and make the measurements we needed,” said Suzie Imber, a space physicist at the University of Leicester, UK, and co-author of the paper.
On May 11, 2022, Endurance launched and reached an altitude of 477.23 miles (768.03 kilometers), splashing down 19 minutes later in the Greenland Sea. Across the 322-mile altitude range where it collected data, Endurance measured a change in electric potential of only 0.55 volts.
“A half a volt is almost nothing — it’s only about as strong as a watch battery,” Collinson said. “But that’s just the right amount to explain the polar wind.”
The Endurance rocket ship launches from Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard. Credit: Andøya Space/Leif Jonny Eilertsen Hydrogen ions, the most abundant type of particle in the polar wind, experience an outward force from this field 10.6 times stronger than gravity. “That’s more than enough to counter gravity — in fact, it’s enough to launch them upwards into space at supersonic speeds,” said Alex Glocer, Endurance project scientist at NASA Goddard and co-author of the paper.
Heavier particles also get a boost. Oxygen ions at that same altitude, immersed in this half-a-volt field, weigh half as much. In general, the team found that the ambipolar field increases what’s known as the “scale height” of the ionosphere by 271%, meaning the ionosphere remains denser to greater heights than it would be without it.
“It’s like this conveyor belt, lifting the atmosphere up into space,” Collinson added.
Endurance’s discovery has opened many new paths for exploration. The ambipolar field, as a fundamental energy field of our planet alongside gravity and magnetism, may have continuously shaped the evolution of our atmosphere in ways we can now begin to explore. Because it’s created by the internal dynamics of an atmosphere, similar electric fields are expected to exist on other planets, including Venus and Mars.
“Any planet with an atmosphere should have an ambipolar field,” Collinson said. “Now that we’ve finally measured it, we can begin learning how it’s shaped our planet as well as others over time.”
By Miles Hatfield and Rachel Lense
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Endurance was a NASA-funded mission conducted through the Sounding Rocket Program at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The Svalbard Rocket Range is owned and operated by Andøya Space. The European Incoherent Scatter Scientific Association (EISCAT) Svalbard radar, located in Longyearbyen, made ground-based measurements of the ionosphere critical to interpreting the rocket data. The United Kingdom Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Research Council of Norway (RCN) funded the EISCAT radar for the Endurance mission. EISCAT is owned and operated by research institutes and research councils of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Japan, China, and the United Kingdom (the EISCAT Associates). The Endurance mission team encompasses affiliates of the Catholic University of America, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Leicester, U.K., the University of New Hampshire, and Penn State University.
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Last Updated Aug 28, 2024 Related Terms
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By NASA
5 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
NASA’s Europa Clipper is seen here on Aug. 21 at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Engineers and technicians deployed and tested the giant solar arrays to be sure they will operate in flight.NASA/Frank Michaux The largest spacecraft NASA has ever built for planetary exploration just got its ‘wings’ — massive solar arrays to power it on the journey to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.
NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft recently got outfitted with a set of enormous solar arrays at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Each measuring about 46½ feet (14.2 meters) long and about 13½ feet (4.1 meters) high, the arrays are the biggest NASA has ever developed for a planetary mission. They have to be large so they can soak up as much sunlight as possible during the spacecraft’s investigation of Jupiter’s moon Europa, which is five times farther from the Sun than Earth is.
The arrays have been folded up and secured against the spacecraft’s main body for launch, but when they’re deployed in space, Europa Clipper will span more than 100 feet (30.5 meters) — a few feet longer than a professional basketball court. The “wings,” as the engineers call them, are so big that they could only be opened one at a time in the clean room of Kennedy’s Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, where teams are readying the spacecraft for its launch period, which opens Oct. 10.
Watch as engineers and technicians deploy and test Europa Clipper’s massive solar arrays in a clean room at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/KSC/APL/Airbus Flying in Deep Space
Meanwhile, engineers continue to assess tests conducted on the radiation hardiness of transistors on the spacecraft. Longevity is key, because the spacecraft will journey more than five years to arrive at the Jupiter system in 2030. As it orbits the gas giant, the probe will fly by Europa multiple times, using a suite of science instruments to find out whether the ocean underneath its ice shell has conditions that could support life.
Powering those flybys in a region of the solar system that receives only 3% to 4% of the sunlight Earth gets, each solar array is composed of five panels. Designed and built at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, and Airbus in Leiden, Netherlands, they are much more sensitive than the type of solar arrays used on homes, and the highly efficient spacecraft will make the most of the power they generate.
At Jupiter, Europa Clipper’s arrays will together provide roughly 700 watts of electricity, about what a small microwave oven or a coffee maker needs to operate. On the spacecraft, batteries will store the power to run all of the electronics, a full payload of science instruments, communications equipment, the computer, and an entire propulsion system that includes 24 engines.
NASA’s Europa Clipper is seen here on Aug. 21 in a clean room at Kennedy Space Center after engineers and technicians tested and stowed the spacecraft’s giant solar arrays.NASA/Frank Michaux While doing all of that, the arrays must operate in extreme cold. The hardware’s temperature will plunge to minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 240 degrees Celsius) when in Jupiter’s shadow. To ensure that the panels can operate in those extremes, engineers tested them in a specialized cryogenic chamber at Liège Space Center in Belgium.
“The spacecraft is cozy. It has heaters and an active thermal loop, which keep it in a much more normal temperature range,” said APL’s Taejoo Lee, the solar array product delivery manager. “But the solar arrays are exposed to the vacuum of space without any heaters. They’re completely passive, so whatever the environment is, those are the temperatures they get.”
About 90 minutes after launch, the arrays will unfurl from their folded position over the course of about 40 minutes. About two weeks later, six antennas affixed to the arrays will also deploy to their full size. The antennas belong to the radar instrument, which will search for water within and beneath the moon’s thick ice shell, and they are enormous, unfolding to a length of 57.7 feet (17.6 meters), perpendicular to the arrays.
This artist’s concept depicts NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter. The mission’s launch period opens Oct. 10. NASA/JPL-Caltech “At the beginning of the project, we really thought it would be nearly impossible to develop a solar array strong enough to hold these gigantic antennas,” Lee said. “It was difficult, but the team brought a lot of creativity to the challenge, and we figured it out.”
More About the Mission
Europa Clipper’s three main science objectives are to determine the thickness of the moon’s icy shell and its interactions with the ocean below, to investigate its composition, and to characterize its geology. The mission’s detailed exploration of Europa will help scientists better understand the astrobiological potential for habitable worlds beyond our planet.
Managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory leads the development of the Europa Clipper mission in partnership with APL for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. APL designed the main spacecraft body in collaboration with JPL and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. The Planetary Missions Program Office at Marshall executes program management of the Europa Clipper mission.
NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at Kennedy, manages the launch service for the Europa Clipper spacecraft, which will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy.
Find more information about Europa here:
europa.nasa.gov
News Media Contacts
Gretchen McCartney
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-6215
gretchen.p.mccartney@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Alana Johnson
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600 / 202-358-1501
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Aug 27, 2024 Related Terms
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/wp-content/plugins/nasa-blocks/assets/images/media/media-example-01.jpgThis landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” speckled with glittering stars is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals for the first time previously invisible areas of star birth.NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI /wp-content/plugins/nasa-blocks/assets/images/media/media-example-01.jpgThis landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” speckled with glittering stars is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals for the first time previously invisible areas of star birth.NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI /wp-content/plugins/nasa-blocks/assets/images/media/media-example-01.jpgThis landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” speckled with glittering stars is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals for the first time previously invisible areas of star birth.NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScIView the full article
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By NASA
4 Min Read Into The Field With NASA: Valley Of Ten Thousand Smokes
NASA scientists begin a day’s field research in Katmai National Park. Credits:
NASA/Patrick Whelley In June 2024, the Goddard Instrument Field Team (GIFT) hiked deep into the backcountry of Alaska’s Katmai National Park to study the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, site of the largest volcanic eruption of the twentieth century. The team’s task: traverse a vast volcanic debris field layered with glacier ice, gathering data and samples to help us better understand this place on Earth and similar terrain on other worlds.
Buried glaciers on Mars and Earth. Top: Orbital view of partially-exposed ice beneath an eroding deposit on Mars, from HiRISE. Bottom: Edge-on view of a partially buried glacier in Alaska with a LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) device in the foreground, from the Goddard Instrument Field Team. Novarupta, the volcano that erupted here in 1912, ejected more than three cubic miles of ash from Earth’s subsurface. The ice nearby is now insulated by, and mixed with, thick layers of geologically “young” volcanic debris. (For comparison, many of the eruption sites NASA teams study are tens of thousands to millions of years old.) Mars, too, has glaciers and ice sheets covered in layers of airfall materials, including dust and volcanic ash.
On Mars, as on Earth, some of the planet’s history is in disguise. Ancient volcanic materials are buried underneath newer deposits of ashy debris. Patterns in these layers (think thickness or thinness, color and texture, chemical and mineral signatures) hold a lot of information, but the message isn’t always clear. Erosion and other surface processes hide evidence of past eruptions, even enormous ones. Since relatively fresh volcanic material blankets the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, it’s an ideal place to observe the early stages of these changes.
Cherie Achilles raises a rock hammer as Alexandra Matiella Novak stands by with a hand-held spectrometer and Alice Baldridge holds a container of rock samples. The hand-held spectrometer gives on-the-spot information about what its targets are made of, helping the team decide which samples to collect and bring back to the lab. In three days of violent eruption, Novarupta blasted an uncommonly wide variety of clays, minerals, and volcanic rocks throughout the surrounding valley. Since then, hot, sulfurous gases have filtered up through underground channels and escaped into the air via countless fumaroles (a.k.a. the “ten thousand smokes”). Fumaroles, together with erosion and other alteration processes, affect how minerals near Novarupta move and change. Research here can help us understand mineral movement and alteration on Mars and other worlds, too. The range of starting materials and alteration patterns in this valley, all from a single eruption, is difficult to match anywhere else.
Heather Graham studies a fumarole – a place where volcanic gases escape from underground – using a hydrogen sulfide collector and sampling equipment. Their goal: check the fumarole for encrusted evidence that microscopic organisms once lived here, consuming energy and changing the rocks’ composition. Research on these kinds of biosignatures helps us understand what the search for life could look like on other worlds. It’s a tough field site to access, especially with heavy science instruments. GIFT worked closely with local collaborators including Katmai National Park to coordinate the expedition. After years of planning and months of training, twelve field team members gathered and geared up in Anchorage, Alaska. Two tiny airplane flights, one all-terrain bus ride, and sixteen hiking miles later, they set up a base camp. From there, small groups hiked out and back each day, gathering data and sample material from throughout the valley.
Left to right: Tabb Prissel, Emileigh Shoemaker, Heather Graham, Andrew Johnson, Justin Hayles, Aditi Pandey, and Patrick Whelley hike out of the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. Scientists teamed up to carry large equipment from place to place and bring each other data from far-flung targets. Some results were predictable, like a new library of samples collected from several different “packages” of differently-composed volcanic debris. Some were surprising–like a core sample that came up containing a pocket of empty space instead of buried glacial ice.
Emileigh Shoemaker and her team use Ground Penetrating Radar (the red box shown here is the GPR antenna) to gather information about long stretches of Earth’s subsurface before physically breaking ground. Here, Shoemaker stands on a huge pile of volcanic ash; hidden beneath the debris is a glacier. GPR data, combined with core samples, soil moisture measurements, and pits dug at strategic locations, can reveal how the glacier is preserved. Analyzing the samples, processing the data, and putting it all together will take time. This is the beginning of GIFT’s Novarupta research, but it’s a chapter of a science story long in the making. Previous studies of the 1912 eruption and its aftermath influenced this expedition’s science plan. The 2024 data and samples, and the new questions arising from the team’s time in the field, are already shaping ideas about future work. NASA has visited before, too. Apollo astronauts and their geology trainers spent time in the Valley in 1965, finding it an unusually Moon-like place to study.
Fieldwork still plays a role in astronaut training–and in advancing lunar science. For example: Novarupta’s chemistry is partly a result of Earth’s plate tectonics. The Moon has volcanic landscapes with similar chemistry, but no tectonic plates. So, what else could explain the parallel? To help address this question, the 2024 team collected samples and ground-truth data from a range of rock formations comparable to the Moon’s Gruithuisen Domes.
Tabb Prissel, Aditi Pandey, and Justin Hayles at Novarupta. The dome of dark rubble behind the scientists is what’s left of the volcano itself: in 1912, material erupted from this spot buried miles of glaciated valley. On Earth, the Moon, Mars, and beyond, geologic processes encode pieces of our solar system’s history. Volcanic deposits store details about a world’s insides at the time of an eruption and evidence of what’s happened at the surface since. Rippling fields of sand dunes, gravel, and ash record the influence of wind where atmospheres exist, like on Venus, Mars, and Titan. Glaciers can tell us about climate history and future–and on Mars, ice research also helps to lay the groundwork for human exploration. It’s much easier to take a close look at these features and processes here on Earth than anywhere else. So, to understand planets (including our own), NASA field scientists start close to home.
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Caela Barry
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Last Updated Aug 22, 2024 Related Terms
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By European Space Agency
On 8 September 2024, the first of four satellites that make up ESA’s Cluster mission will reenter Earth’s atmosphere over the South Pacific Ocean Uninhabited Area.
This marks the end of the historic mission, over 24 years after it was sent into space to measure Earth’s magnetic environment. Though the remaining three satellites will also stop making scientific observations, discoveries using existing mission data are expected for years to come.
This ‘targeted reentry’ is the first of its kind. ESA’s efforts to ensure a clean end to the Cluster mission go beyond international standards, making the agency a world-leader in sustainable space exploration.
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