NASA Experiment to Track Space ‘Doughnut’ Encircling Earth

Produced Video

Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.

Complete transcript available.

Music Credit: "A Gift” by Nicholas Smith [PRS] from Universal Production Music

Additional Imagery: J. Goldstein, Johns Hopkins APL

Sound Effects: Pixabay

After being installed on the International Space Station, NASA’s STORIE mission will scan outward, away from Earth, to image energetic neutral atoms (ENAs) from Earth’s ring current. It will view one slice of the ring current at a time, but as it orbits Earth, STORIE will build up a complete view of this invisible, doughnut-shaped band of particles. In this animation, the curved orange lines represent field lines in Earth’s magnetic field, and the moving wedge of green rays represents STORIE’s field of view as the space station orbits the planet. The graph at the bottom shows a simulation of STORIE’s observations of the ring current as it observes one side of the ring and then the other.

Credit: NASA/Gonzalo Cucho-Padin

This model shows how particles flow between Earth’s magnetotail (left) and the inner magnetosphere (right). The curved white line in the lower chart depicts the approximate boundary between those regions. Earth is represented as the black-and-white circle. The solar wind flows in from the right. The colors represent the velocity (speed and direction) that particles are flowing, either sunward (blue) or anti-sunward (red). The line plot in the upper chart represents the speed of flows as they enter the inner magnetosphere at different locations along the white curved boundary.

Credit: NASA/Alex Glocer

This simulation shows fluctuations in the doughnut-shaped ring current during a solar storm. In the color scale used here, yellow shows where the ring current is most intense while purple shows where it is least intense. The ring current can be very dynamic in time, and its intensity can vary significantly at different locations in space.

Credit: NASA/Austin Brenner