When the northern lights come out, it sometimes appears as if the sky is on fire. There is an eerie connection between the Sun and our planet’s atmosphere that can sometimes cause the sky to unexpectedly glow with shades of red, yellow, purple and green; an atmospheric phenomenon called the northern lights or Aurora Borealis. The Sun is constantly spraying the solar system with millions of tons of charged particles each minute. The stream of charged particles from the Sun, or solar wind, consists mostly of electrons and protons. Sometimes the Sun is very energetic and violently ejects the particles in a solar flare or coronal mass ejection (CME). In the simplest explanation, aurorae are produced when these charged particles collide with Earth’s magnetic field and spiral down along magnetic field lines where their energy interacts with gases in Earth’s atmosphere. The result causes the gases at various levels in the atmosphere to glow or give off light.…
Prologue “Come on, it’s leaving!” “You know, maybe I’m having second thoughts on this whole ‘Jamestown’ ordeal…” “Aw you’re just scared, what do think will happen? Us get stranded or something? As if!” Ok fine, let me bring an extra flare gun in case something does happen. Let’s get going!” It was the 10th of December, 1606 when John Lorell and his close friend, Thomas Locke, boarded the Discovery, the smallest of the three ships sailing to create the first successful colony in North…
The Sun, the closest star to Earth, and a life-sustaining necessity. It is also the center of space and solar weather, which powers and affects much of the solar system’s activities and life on Earth. Space weather goes hand in hand with the Sun’s constant gaseous activities, which depend on the Sun’s natural occurrences. This paper discusses the important topics of solar plasma, solar wind, as well as solar flares and coronal mass ejections. It also looks at human abilities to capture and use…
harboring negative emotions and having problems with their comrades [3]. Frank and Leo were arguing about something that was resolved months ago. Just imagine what it would be like if we came across a problem that needed to be solved immediately. It is a common misconception that space is empty. It does appear to be a vast vacuum with nothing happening in most of it. Even though we are millions of miles away from the nearest object, there are still particles around. Our spacecraft has been…
Jack O’Keefe Ramsdem, Stephen W. "Total Eclipse of the Sun." Sky Watch (1089-4888), Jan. 2017, p. 48. EBSCOhost, With less than a year left, America is getting closer to its solar eclipse. This major event should be happening on August 21st 2017. The solar eclipse will be a one time thing for some people in their lives and they would ever want to have to miss a once in a lifetime opportunity. With social media and just the media in general, this event will be one of the most popular phenomenons…
thunderous applause in the main cabin. “It will be useful to understand more about Gnaritus’ three suns for your daily lives. So, let me begin by summarizing the background information that we have already gone over near the beginning of this lecture series. The three suns of this solar system are stars, which contain mainly hydrogen gasses with a lesser amount of helium. Due to the intense force of gravity, the proximity of the hydrogen atoms in the center of these suns results in their…
When one thinks of Space Solar power they think of something that is futuristic. In 1941, Issac Asmiov who wrote science fiction published a short story called “Reason.” In the short story, it talked about a space station that collected energy from the sun to send to other planets by the usage of microwave beams. In the story there is a line that says, “"Our beams feed these worlds energy drawn from one of those huge incandescent globes that happens to be near us. We call that globe the Sun ...…
a small tape recorder on it as well. It showed us craters on Mars and while in Mars’ solar orbit it also taught us about Mars’ solar wind environment; teaching us about the magnetic field and atmosphere of the planet. There is a current mission happening called MAVEN that hopes to learn more about how fast atmospheric gases are being lost to space today, leading to knowledge about what happened in the past. This spacecraft will make direct measurements of Mar’s complete atmosphere; providing us…
4 understanding of the Suns temperatures, in June of 2013, NASA launched the IRIS solar observatory. IRIS, short for Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, was launched to use imaging spectrography on the Sun. NASA’s goal was to determine “how solar material moves, gathers energy, and heats up as it travels through a little-understood region in the sun 's lower atmosphere. This interface region between the Sun 's photosphere and corona powers its dynamic million-degree atmosphere and drives the…
experience exposure to the radiation during the flight, the scheduled working period and time interval between separate missions. The risk during the flight are mostly come from the random exposure due to the solar cosmic rays (SCR) or the solar particle events (SPE), galactic cosmic rays (GCR) and trapped radiation. GCR happened outside the solar system and impinge on Earth. The direct of the source, and mechanism of it is unknown. “Because of their high energies up to 1020 eV, they most…