The STEREO-A spacecraft will pass between Earth and the sun this weekend, getting the chance to team up with other NASA missions.
STEREO-A won't just be collecting visual data as it makes its flyby of Earth over the weekend. The spacecraft will also feel eruptions from our star, called coronal mass ejections .
When blasted out into space, these massive plumes of charged particles can disrupt satellites orbiting Earth, interfere with radio signals across the planet and even damage power infrastructure. The influence of CMEs, in terms of whether they cause damage or disruption upon reaching Earth, is dictated by magnetic fields carried along with them. These fields can change dramatically as the charged particles cross the 93 million miles of space between the sun and Earth.
Scientists can build models of CMEs and their magnetic fields, but these models are limited when observations come from a single spacecraft. "It's like the parable about the blind men and the elephant — the one who feels the legs says 'it’s like a tree trunk,' and the one who feels the tail says 'it’s like a snake,'" University of New Hampshire professor and principal investigator for one of STEREO-A’s instruments, Toni Galvin, said."That's what we're stuck with right now with CMEs, because we typically only have one or two spacecraft right next to each other measuring it.
In the months before it flies by our planet, STEREO-A has been collecting data about Earth-directed CMEs — and it will continue to do this for months after it leaves our planet's vicinity again. As it has been doing this, so have other near-Earth spacecraft. Put together, these datasets should give solar scientists different views of the same CMEs, revealing the ejections' magnetic innards.
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