NASA's TWINS and IBEX spacecraft observe impact of powerful
solar storm from inside and outside Earth's magnetosphere
(NCYT/SWRI) The spacecraft, NASA's Two Wide-angle Imaging
Neutral-atom Spectrometers (TWINS) and Interstellar Boundary
Explorer (IBEX), observed the impact from inside and outside the
Earth's magnetosphere, respectively. The energetic neutral atom
(ENA) cameras aboard each spacecraft enabled global imaging of
the magnetosphere, the invisible bubble that protects Earth from
the majority of charged particles from the Sun, as it compressed
in response to sharply faster solar wind. The storm, observed
April 5, 2010, also is thought to have caused an important
communications satellite, Galaxy-15, to founder and drift,
taking almost a year to return to its station. |These integrated
images show energetic neutral atom (ENA) emissions as seen by
TWINS. (Photo: SwRI)| The IBEX images (taken from a distance of
around 180,000 miles) show an immediate compression of the
magnetosphere as it was impacted by