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NASA EDGE: Understanding Auroras with VISIONS
May 13,2013
NASA EDGE: Understanding Auroras with VISIONS
VISIONS is an acronym that tells you what the mission is.
It’s using imaging as opposed to direct measurement along the trajectory to measure a phenomenon that we’ve known about for a long time but never have had pictures of. That phenomenon is called the auroral wind.
The auroral wind is a wind of gas or ions that come out of our atmosphere and they’re driven out by the aurora.
The aurora comes in, heats the atmosphere, gets it energized and boils this atmosphere off.
It’s a pretty weak, thin stream of gas but it turns out to be very important because space around Earth is so empty.
The magnetosphere is so empty that having this gas, this oxygen flow out, can dominate, at least temporarily, what’s happening out in the magnetosphere.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff that happens here. But to study the aurora, you go to basically Alaska, Norway or Sweden.
