1999 SPACE SCIENCE VIDEOTAPES |
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Tape Title | Record ID | Date Produced | TRT: |
Synopsis |
| SPEEDY SOLAR WIND SURFS MAGNETIC WAVES | G99-062 | 7/8/99 | 00:13:06 | The high-speed portion of the solar wind achieves its unexpectedly high velocity by "surfing" magnetic waves in the Sun's outer atmosphere to reach speeds up to 500 miles per second, according to coordinated observations by two spacecraft made during John Glenn's return to space. |
TAPE CONTENTS: |
| ITEM (1): SURFING THE SOLAR WIND - The outermost solar atmosphere, or corona, is normally visible only during a solar eclipse. Instruments aboard Spartan 201 and SOHO create artificial eclipses to view the accelerating solar wind of electrically charged particles. New observations of particles ``surfing'' on waves in the corona have shed light on an ongoing mystery of why the solar wind flows as fast as it does.
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| ITEM (2): WIND SPIRALING AND WAVE DAMPING - Charged particles in the solar wind spiral around lines of magnetic force, and these lines oscillate back and forth to create outward-propagating waves. When the particles' spiraling frequencies match the wave frequencies, the particles can absorb the waves' energy; this spins up the particles into larger orbits, gives them an added outward boost, and damps out the waves.
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| ITEM (3): THE SPEEDY SOLAR "WIND" - The solar wind comes in two varieties: high speed and low speed. The low speed solar wind moves at roughly a million miles per hour, while the high speed wind is even faster, moving at speeds as high as two million miles per hour. |
| ITEM (4): EFFECTS OF THE SOLAR WIND ON EARTH -As it flows past Earth, the solar wind changes the shape and structure of the Earth's magnetic field, which can damage satellites and disrupt communications and power systems. |
| ITEM (5): SOURCE OF THE SOLAR WIND - These combined images display UV light emitted by the solar corona over one full solar rotation (27 days) in August 1996. The inner images of the solar disk were taken by the EIT instrument aboard SOHO. The outer diffuse emission was observed by the UVCS instrument aboard SOHO, which creates an "artificial eclipse" in ultraviolet light to observe the dim extended solar corona. The dark regions at the north and south poles are called "coronal holes," and they are thought to be the primary source regions of the high-speed solar wind.
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| ITEM (6): SOLAR WIND - OBSERVATIONS FROM LASCO - Image of the solar corona -- source of the solar wind -- as recorded by SOHO's Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) instrument.
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| ITEM (7): SUN - OBSERVATIONS BY EIT - Image of the full sun as seen by SOHO's Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT).
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| ITEM (8): SOHO ANIMATION - Animation of the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). The Solar Ultraviolet Measurements of Emitted Radiation (SUMER) instrument on SOHO detected the solar wind by observing the ultraviolet spectrum over a large area of the solar north polar region.
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| ITEM (9): SPARTAN 201 / STS-95 MISSION - Images of NASA's Spartan 201 spacecraft deployed from the space shuttle during the historic STS-95 mission during John Glenn's return to space.
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| ITEM (10): SPARTAN ANIMATION
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| ITEM (11): SOLAR SCIENTISTS AT WORK - During the ongoing Mars Global Surveyor mission, the MOLA instrument is collecting about 900,000 measurements of elevation every day. MOLA was designed and built by the Laser Remote Sensing Branch of Laboratory for Terrestrial Physics at Goddard. The Mars Global Surveyor mission is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA.
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| ITEM (12): INTERVIEW EXCERPTS WITH DR. CRAIG DEFOREST, STANFORD UNIVERSITY
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