From Aug. 19-20, ESA’s (European Space Agency) Juice (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) mission made history with a daring lunar-Earth flyby and double gravity assist maneuver, a spaceflight first.
After Juice dove through Earth’s radiation belts and began leaving our planet behind, the spacecraft turned so NASA’s onboard JENI (Jovian Energetic Neutrals and Ions) camera could use its special sensors to snap the sharpest-ever images of the hot plasma encircling Earth, which is invisible to the human eye.
Now strung into a movie, the images showcase the sudden appearance of vast regions of this hot plasma on the nightside of Earth’s magnetosphere. These bursts, called substorm injections, happen when Earth’s magnetosphere - stretched millions of kilometers behind Earth like a slingshot - releases explosively. Plasma trapped in the magnetosphere is suddenly rocketed toward Earth and heated to millions of degrees. This phenomenon is expected to occur on a much grander scale at Jupiter.
Juice is looking slightly “up” at Earth’s magnetosphere in the video, with pairs of magnetic field lines plotted to reference the local time at noon, dusk, midnight and dawn. The Sun is off to the left in the frames, the nightside off to the right. The location of the Moon and Jupiter are marked for reference.
The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, in Laurel, Maryland, manages the JENI instrument for NASA on ESA’s Juice mission. The JENI instrument is part of the Solar System Exploration Program, managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
Credit: European Space Agency/NASA/Johns Hopkins APL
30 сен 2024
