Citizen science: Map the Earth's magnetic shield with the Space Umbrella Project

A flow of charged particles called solar wind flows from the sun toward Earth. Here it encounters the Earth’s magnetic fields, which protect our planet like a giant umbrella. The Space Umbrella Project needs your help to investigate this dynamic region, where NASA’s Magnetosphere Multiscale (MMS) mission has been collecting data since 2015. The MMS mission studies how the magnetic fields of the sun and Earth connect and disconnect, explosively transferring energy from one to the other in a process important to the sun, other planets, and everywhere in the universe.