|
Earth’s Ionosphere drops to a new low
Watts
Up With That?
Wednesday, Dec 17, 2008
The height of the ionosphere/space transition is controlled in
part by the amount of extreme ultraviolet energy emitted by the
Sun and a somewhat contracted ionosphere could have been expected
because C/NOFS was launched during a minimum in the 11-year cycle
of solar activity. However, the size of the actual contraction
caught investigators by surprise. (Credit: NASA/Goddard Space
Flight Center)
ScienceDaily (Dec. 16, 2008) — Observations made by NASA
instruments onboard an Air Force satellite have shown that the
boundary between the Earth’s upper atmosphere and space
has moved to extraordinarily low altitudes. These observations
were made by the Coupled Ion Neutral Dynamics Investigation (CINDI)
instrument suite, which was launched aboard the U.S. Air Force’s
Communication/Navigation Outage Forecast System (C/NOFS) satellite
on April 16, 2008.
The CINDI suite, which was built under the direction Principal
Investigator Rod Heelis of the University of Texas at Dallas,
includes both ion and neutral sensors and makes measurements of
the variations in neutral and ion densities and drifts.
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
CINDI and C/NOFS were designed to study disturbances in Earth’s
ionosphere that can result in a disruption of navigation and communication
signals. The ionosphere is a gaseous envelope of electrically
charged particles that surrounds our planet and it is important
because Radar, radio waves, and global positioning system signals
can be disrupted by ionospheric disturbances.
CINDI’s first discovery was, however, that the ionosphere
was not where it had been expected to be. During the first months
of CINDI operations the transition between the ionosphere and
space was found to be at about 260 miles (420 km) altitude during
the nighttime, barely rising above 500 miles (800 km) during the
day. These altitudes were extraordinarily low compared with the
more typical values of 400 miles (640 km) during the nighttime
and 600 miles (960 km) during the day.
|
INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
|
|
