All right.
Space weather is similar to terrestrial weather.
Think of space as not being empty.
We have winds that consist of charged particles that flow from the sun.
We have hurricanes.
We call them space storms, or coronal mass ejections
that come from the sun and move towards us.
We have temperature that charged particles can be
a very high energy and can be very hot, in other words.
And the hotter they are, the bigger the effects that they have on, on
on the environment and especially when they get into the Earth's system.
So space weather is the study of exactly the same thing
we do terrestrially to understand how these things change from the sun.
And when they get to the Earth,
the downstream effects that this has on our Earth's system,
the magnetosphere and everything that's contained in it, the spacecraft,
and ultimately all the way down to the ground.
What TRACERS helps you to
understand is what makes a storm big in the way it affects us
here at Earth.
The energy flow or the energy that's contained in the charged particles
from the sun
and carries with it, and a magnetic field when that interacts with the Earth.
It's a complex interactions, and sometimes a lot of energy gets transferred.
Sometimes little energy gets transferred.
TRACERS sits at an altitude in the polar cusp,
which has a direct entry into the solar wind.
So it's like a mirror of what happens out far in space.
So you can measure down below all the varying conditions that lead
to something being a really big storm or a very small storm.
And this is still something we do not know.
And in terms of predictions, is something we have to know if we want to
get better at it.
You know, the solar wind we mentioned that before
is carried from the sun and it has embedded magnetic fields.
And these magnetic field have directions
that can be either northwards or southwards.
And the Earth's magnetic field is fixed.
It's controlled by the Earth's core.
And it has always a fixed direction.
And when these fields are in the same direction, not much happens.
You know, it's like it's like two spouts of water going in the same direction.
There's not much action going on,
but when they are in opposite directions and meet.
And if you think about two water spouts being pointed each other where they meet,
particles get redirected in all sorts of directions.
And that's kind of what we talk about magnetic reconnection,
where these field lines can reconnect and the particles that are tied to them
can enter
the Earth's system can go all the way down to the atmosphere where you have aurora
that can cause large currents that give you all the other
geomagnetic effects that we talked about before.
Well, the
overarching question in understanding how much energy
is transferred into the Earth's system is to understand over
what area does this happen and how does it happen in time?
Does it happen a little bit here, a little bit over there?
Does it happen all over the front side of the magnetosphere and TRACERS
cutting through in the Earth’s cusp down low is ideally positioned to see that.
And the two spacecrafts are needed.
Well think about it in terms of two boats in an ocean.
When the two boats go up together,
you know, you know that the whole ocean is going up.
If one goes up, then the other goes up.
You know, you might be seeing a wave that goes past you,
and that's sort of a change in space and a change in time that we can disentangle.
And that gives you the evidence to understand how well reconnection work,
how well is the energy being transferred into our system.
And thus we need to understand these details in order to make better predictions.
Right.
I mean, you have to space weather here at Earth.
At Earth, we are lucky.
We've got the magnetosphere, which is like a shield that shields us
from the sun and the harmful radiation in most parts.
Not in the cusp, of course, that's why we're there..
But also at the moon, at Mars, where people are trying
to go to understanding how the sun operates is important.
Reconnection is the process that happens at the sun
that actually leads to these large eruptions.
But here at Earth, it's one of the few places
we can actually study it at our own planet.
We can actually get to it and measure it.
Space weather
affects everything around us, but of course, in particular
the assets that we have out in space. Just like terrestrial weather protects -
we need to know
when storms are to protect ships on sea, to protect infrastructure,
we need to protect our infrastructure in space
in a similar way.
There are several sites available.
There's NASA dot gov slash TRACERS [nasa.gov/tracers] backup traces and NASA solar system [@NASASolarSystem] on various
social media accounts.
On satellites in particular, you have, effects
of surface charging, which can give you discharges on the spacecraft.
You've got the high energy particles getting right into the electronics,
giving you upsets in the computer, and then you got the
the overall dose of radiation, which eventually can kill a satellite
and limit the lifetime of the satellite.
Well, for me, it's, it's the culmination of having worked
with these guys for a very long time and getting to know the team.
It's.
And a lot of them out to my colleagues.
But from a science point of view, it's it's very exciting to see
the next step going forward and being able to do these kinds of measurements
at the, at the cusps in the low Earth orbit.
We've had glimpses of the dynamics there from rocket flights in the past.
But to really understand, you know, you can't send up 3000 rockets.
TRACERS can go up and do these measurements repeatedly.
We're going to collect
about 3000 crossings of the cusp region throughout the TRACERS mission.
That gives us enough events and enough statistics to really untangle
when and how the solar wind couples in, and when
and how reconnection is really working well and when it does not work well.
And again, those are the basic physics of the reconnections
that will also help us understand how it works on the sun and by extension,
in the broader heliosphere and also the broader universe.
We have a range of other missions that are going out
there, that are also been around for a long, long time.
EZIE and PUNCH have just launched,
they look at the sun through images, you know, remotely, but
you cannot do in images measuring things that actually happen locally at the sun.
And and TRACERS again is the one mission that allows us
to study these processes in situ where we can get at them.
So it complements all the other science and putting all these bits and pieces
together, observing the sun.
But the images doing some of the measurements on the, on the reconnection,
you know, it kind of fills out the full picture of how our sun
interacts with the planetary system and us here on Earth in particular.
Right.
In the past, we've gotten snapshots of what happens at reconnection
at the front side of the Earth by a rocket flying through the cusp region
TRACERS is the first mission that not only flies
through this region repeatedly, but does so with two spacecraft.
So we can really understand the details of, time and,
and space where these, reconnection happens up front.
And that is critical
for us to understand the process to the point of predictability.
And going forward, the data from the TRACERS cusp crossing, we expect
over 3000 of them will help us to build better predictive models for the Earth.