The European Space Agency’s SMOS and Swarm satellites have, for the first time, successfully tracked a severe solar storm, following an X1.1 solar flare and a halo coronal mass ejection (CME) on March 23, 2024. The CME impacted Earth on March 24, producing a G4 – Severe geomagnetic storm — the strongest geomagnetic storm since September 2017.
Launched in 2013, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Swarm mission, consisting of three satellites, has provided a decade of invaluable data on Earth’s magnetic field and core dynamics. This data has enabled significant advances in understanding the mechanisms behind the magnetic field’s slow changes, as detailed in a recent ESA-funded project report.
Using information from ESA’s Swarm satellite mission, scientists have discovered a completely new type of magnetic wave that sweeps across the outermost part of Earth’s outer core every seven years. The discovery offers a way to probe the cylindrical radial component of the magnetic field inside Earth’s core.
For several years now, scientists have been puzzled as to why the Earth's north magnetic pole has been moving rapidly from the Canadian Arctic towards Siberia. After studying 20 years of satellite data, researchers from the University of Leeds in the UK and the…
Over the past 200 years, Earth's magnetic field has lost around 9% of its strength. Meanwhile, a large region of reduced magnetic intensity has developed between Africa and South America — known as South Atlantic Anomaly. Over the past 5 years, however, a…
ESA’s Swarm mission is continually yielding more insight into how our protective shield is generated, how it behaves and how it is changing. Adding yet another string to its bow, Swarm is now tracking changes in the magnetic field produced in the oceans in…
European Space Agency's used data provided by their trio of Swarm satellite and combined it with historical data from the German CHAMP satellite and observations from ships and aircraft to produce the most detailed map of the Earth's lithosphere. The map is…
A new phenomenon seen as a giant purple streak of light in the night sky has been recently discovered and, for lack of a better word, named Steve. Steve was discovered thanks to scientists, citizen scientists, ground-based imagers and ESA's magnetic field Swarm…
ESA’s Swarm mission has discovered that this seasonal variation of Birkeland currents, strong electric currents in the upper atmosphere, is not the same in the north and south polar regions. Named after Kristian Birkeland, the scientist a century ago who first…
Scientists analyzing data obtained by Swarm trio of satellites have discovered supersonic plasma jets high up in our atmosphere that can push temperatures up to almost 10 000 °C (18 000 °F). The discovery was presented at this week’s Swarm Science…
