NASA recently announced the discovery of a new electric field in the region of space surrounding the Earth. Apparently it was something that should have been there, but hadn't been conclusively observed before.
Scientists find a long-sought electric field in Earth’s atmosphere
What they were looking for is called the "ambipolar electric field". As the article says, it was predicted in the 1960s, but deemed difficult to measure. So some enterprising NASA atmospheric scientists decided to look for it."Collinson and colleagues developed a new instrument called a photoelectron spectrometer specifically to detect the electric field. The team mounted the spectrometer on a rocket named Endurance, after the ship that carried Ernest Shackleton to explore the Antarctic in 1914.
Getting to the launchpad in Svalbard, Norway was a journey worthy of the rocket’s name. The team traveled by boat for 17 hours to get to the archipelago of Svalbard, located just a few hundred kilometers from the North Pole. Several members of the team fell ill with COVID-19 on the way. And the war between Russia and Ukraine had begun just a few months earlier.
“At the time, there was a certain amount of nervousness about firing off rockets,” Collinson says. “Polar bears were the least of it. We had war and plague.”
Two more days of blizzards kept Endurance grounded. When the rocket finally launched on May 11, 2022, it went straight up through the atmosphere to about 770 kilometers, measuring the energies of electrons every 10 seconds. The whole flight lasted 19 minutes. At the end, the rocket splashed into the Greenland Sea.
Endurance measured a change in electric potential of 0.55 volts between the altitudes of 248 kilometers and 768 kilometers — exactly enough to explain the polar wind on its own, without any other atmospheric effects."
Science!
Here's a video that gets deeper into the science (and it also shows the launch, which goes WHOOSH!)
No comments:
Post a Comment