Help NASA prepare for the next solar storm disaster
NASA has always made it a point to encourage us, citizen scientists, to lend a helping hand. Right now, they could really use your help to protect Earth from waves of punishing and disruptive solar winds.
The website may appear to be from the Internet circa 2002, but NASA’s Magnetosphere Multiscale (MMS) mission is not. that old. That said, the project is approaching 16 years of ongoing, groundbreaking research. MMS provides astronomers with vital information about the Sun’s powerful and highly energetic solar winds, as well as how they affect Earth’s magnetosphere. Without the protective shield, the cosmic radiation that would have fried the planet long ago, ensuring that no life could ever develop on the planet.
But even with the magnetosphere, solar winds regularly make their presence known and sometimes cause damage. The most famous example is the Carrington Event of 1859, when a powerful solar storm caused dazzling northern lights to extend as far as South America. The charged cosmic particles were also powerful enough to ignite some telegraph wires. Although rather strange at the time, a similar situation today would wreak havoc on energy grids, GPS navigation, satellite networks, and many other interconnected electronic systems.
An international coalition of emergency preparedness experts, astronomers and government agencies have long worked to prepare society for such a calamity – and the more information they have about solar winds, the better. That’s exactly what NASA’s MMS mission has been doing since its launch in 2015 with a quartet of satellites in near-equatorial orbit regularly measuring what’s called magnetic reconnection. According to the mission’s website, reconnection occurs whenever the magnetic fields of the Sun and Earth align or separate. This process is responsible for “the explosive transfer of energy from one to the other in an important process at the sun, other planets and throughout the universe. But before you can study magnetic reconnection, you need to know when it actually happens. That’s where the MMS Space Umbrella project comes in.”
Although this is a large project, you don’t need a degree in astrophysics to help NASA analyze the data. After following a brief tutorial, volunteers are presented with a spectral image depicting 10 minutes of data collected by the four satellites. A one-minute tape is highlighted, which participants then examine to assess whether it shows the magnetosphere itself, the sheath (a region closer to the sun containing both solar and planetary energy particles), or a mixture of both. Magnetosphere and sheath spectral data are particularly easy to visualize based on band color, width, and positioning. Once familiar with the details, citizen scientists can then begin to classify MMS satellite data as they wish.
You will not be alone in your work. The Space Umbrella site includes an active forum for collaboration, regular updates and special events. Don’t worry about being late to the party either. Even with nearly 600,000 classifications recorded, the Space Umbrella project is estimated to be only about 40% complete – so get to it, solar detectives.
The best new PopSci 2025 releases
