Posted on 11/30/2019 7:11:33 AM PST by BenLurkin
If you venture too close to one of Earth's poles, you'll notice something rather strange happening to any gadgets using radio waves, satellite connections, or GPS.
NASA is backing a range of initiatives to investigate the northern polar cusp, a funnel in space that's thought to be behind some of the weird space phenomena happening above the poles.
This funnel, and the matching one at the South Pole, allows solar winds from the Sun to get right down to Earth's atmosphere in other words, here the solar winds aren't reflected back out into space by the Earth's magnetic field, as they are across the rest of the planet.
All of this measuring and data collection should help scientists better understand what they're dealing with, and better predict how the cusp is going to behave in the future which is crucial if we're going to avoid serious interference with our low-orbit and Earth technology systems.
CREX-2, ICI-5, and CHI are part of a broader initiative of nine different missions investigating the northern polar cusp, a number of which have already been run.
"Each mission has its own strengths," says physicist Miguel Larsen from Clemson University in South Carolina, who is in charge of CHI.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencealert.com ...
It’s not a funnel in space.
It’s aliens.
And even if it is a funnel in space...it was created by aliens.
Not the illegal kind either :)
NASA has become welfare for unemployed scientists—and public relations hacks.
Man on the moon—any day now, any day now....
Silly. It is most likely something to do with atributes of the magnetosphere at the poles; just as why you don’t get “northern lights” except at the poles.
I’ve observed “northern lights” as far south as Des Moines, IA...
Heres the problem. Now when do I get my grant money?
Ththis stuff has been happening since time began. All of a sudden it is a crisis.
Solution: more gubmint munny. Money! Money! Money! Or we will all die soon. (Rant finished
Weren’t the magnetic poles supposed to reverse any day now? Maybe that’s what’s happening.
The earth’s protective magnetic shield is weakening in advance of an anticipated flip in polarity. True magnetic north is skeedaddling across the top of the globe and veering headlong into Russia, forcing NOAA to accelerate its update schedule in order to permit navigation equipment manufacturers and users to avoid excessively large errors. Simultaneously our Sun is in the midst of the deepest solar minimum (in terms of the 11 year sunspot cycle) of the space age and is apparently also entering a multi-cycle grand solar minimum. The confluence of these factors is apparently allowing the solar wind to rush relatively undeflected toward and into the earth’s polar regions. In other words, this actually is quite out of the ordinary.
There is good earth science being conducted, using new sensors that take measurements in spectrums we havent collected in before, and enhancing our understanding of the very complex environment around our planet. I dont fault nasa for that. But I would say articles like this that dumb those activities down to the level they do are a public relations failure of massive proportion on nasas part. They make it sound like we are learning all over again what we have known for 70 years now. (For many that may be true)
Exactly. I was aware of that in the 7th grade.
San Felipe Mexico for me.
Yes, you gave the details of what I was referring to.
My basic point was it was no mystery in the general sense. It’s all related to the magnetosphere.
This folks is why we’re twenty-two trillion in the hole.
“Ive observed northern lights as far south as Des Moines, IA...”
Yes, but not in St. Louis.
Climate change causes black poles.
The energy dumped into the depths of the atmosphere during a CME is totally neglected.
Ion flux is totally ignored.
The magnetic energy from a solar flare that dumps enough energy to compress and distort the earth's magnetic field and induce powerful electrical currents is totally ignored.
The heat delivered directly to the asphalt in your parking lot is ignored.
Worse, when a solar flare dumps energy onto the earth, in terms of upper atmosphere absorption, the total energy accounted for in the climate models paradoxically DROPS as the X-rays, induced currents, and and particle bursts don't effectively couple to the upper atmosphere!
One comprehensive source for this is here.
Back in the late ‘50s, we saw the northern lights all the way down in Nashville.
So it’s not that new.
Magnetic or true north? If magnetic, then it can probably be explained by the charged particles from space hitting the atmosphere producing noise in the frequency ranges of the gadgets that use those frequencies.
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