•
13 December 2001 - The Dawn of a New Age
Just over four decades ago, with America reeling in the
wake of the Soviet Sputnik 1, a little-known scientist from
the cornfields of Iowa proposed a scientific satellite named Explorer.
Launched on January 31, 1958, it returned ground-breaking
scientific data about the eponymous Van Allen radiation belts
encircling the Earth.
On December 13, 2001 another pioneer in space physics was
honored at the Fall American Geophyiscal Union where Dr. James
Burch delivered the Van Allen Lecture on "Magnetospheric
Imaging - Promise to Reality." Dr. Burch explained how the six
scientific instruments on the IMAGE spacecraft give
latter-day space scientists "new eyes" and allow them for
the first time to understand the Earth's magnetosphere as a
global system. Among the new discoveries featured in his talk
were LENA images of the Earth losing its atmosphere in direct
response to solar wind pressure variations.
A movie of the localized ion outflow in response to solar wind pressure
pulses was presented; to view this movie, click
here (1.66MB)
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19 October 2001 - LENA on the Airwaves
"In the grand sense, what we're trying to do is develop a meteorology of space so that
we can both know how to design a spacecraft to survive out there and also have some
warning of space storms, " explained Dr. Thomas E. Moore in an interview conducted
by
Earth and Sky Radio Series which ran earlier this week.
The first part of the two-part program explained how the solar wind, a stream of mostly
charged particles from the Sun, can disrupt communications on Earth. The second part
discussed how scientists working with the LENA data may be able to predict using the
small neutral component of the solar wind when these "space storms" are about to
occur. (click
here
for transcript and audio on solar wind) (click
here
for transcript and audio on neutral solar wind).
•
8 August 2001 - LENA imager team collects more than just neutral atoms
The NASA Group Achievement Award is granted in recognition of an outstanding
accomplishment that has been made through the coordination of many individual
efforts and has contributed substantially to the accomplishment of the
mission of NASA. This year NASA Headquarters bestowed this honor upon the
Low Energy Neutral Atom (LENA) Imager team citing its "dedication to the
successful development" of this unprecedented instrumentation (click
here
for award citation) (click
here for LENA slide from ceremony).
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19 June 2001 - LENA Participates in Technology Showcase 2001
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
, a world
leader in the development and use of 21st century advanced technology,
works to expand scientific discovery, to enable the nation to accomplish
more cutting-edge science at low cost, and to fortify its leadership role
as a national resource of new technology. To this end, Goddard held its
third technology showcase on June 14-15, 2001. LENA was one of 107 new
technologies presented to the public. Click
here
for a screen version (3.8 MBytes) of the LENA poster (PDF Version).
Click
here
for a print version (13.1 MBytes) of the LENA poster (PDF Version).
•
5 June 2001 -
Science Covers LENA Neutral Wind Discovery
Science Now, an online news service of Science magazine, has published a popular
account of the recent LENA neutral solar wind discovery (click the title above for
a link to the news item). The article summarizes the significance of this first
observation of neutral atoms from the solar wind, and points to this page as well
as to a related Science now article on space weather and storms.
•
4 May 2001 - LENA Imager Operations Anniversary
The LENA team celebrated one year of LENA science operations last night with
traditional Maryland fare: seafood, and a birthday cake. With only one
year's worth of science data under her belt so far, LENA already has notched
a plethora of accomplishments including imaging ionospheric outflow and its
response to CMEs, observing the neutral solar wind, and interstellar
neutrals. More to come...
•
22 March 2001 - Racin' with the Wind...
Those captivated by the "free spirits" immortalized by icons like Peter Fonda
and James Dean now have some new rebels who can't be stopped: neutral atoms
from the solar wind. Click here for the
GSFC press release.
•
16 February 2001 - Collaborative Coup
In a stunning display of the power and promise of multi-instrument
collaborations resulting from the IMAGE mission, Fuselier et al., in a
recently accepted article to appear in the
IMAGE special issue of Geophysical Research Letters, combine LENA and
FUV data to investigate the timing between an impulsive input of energy
into the ionosphere and the resulting ionospheric outflow. They conclude
that for 30 eV neutral oxygen outflow there is no delay between the
ionospheric disturbance and the initiation of the ionospheric outflow.
•
17 January 2001 - Solar Wind LENAs to be Featured in First JGR Paper
The Journal of Geophysical Research Space Physics has accepted its first
LENA paper for publication sometime in the next few months.
The paper, by Collier et al., is entitled
"Observations of Neutral Atoms from the Solar Wind"
and discusses the
first observations of the neutral solar wind formed by charge exchange
with interstellar neutrals, dust and the Earth's hydrogen geocorona.
In the two specific events examined in the paper, the flux of neutral
atoms observed by LENA inside the magnetosphere is about
10-3 - 10-4
of the solar wind flux. The implications of these observations on
proposals concerning the effect of the neutral solar wind on geophysical
phenomena, early CME warning and ozone depletion are discussed.
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