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"Five spacecraft from two ESA missions unexpectedly found themselves engulfed by waves of electrical and magnetic energy as they travelled through Earth’s night-time shadow on 5 August 2004.
The data collected by the spacecraft are giving scientists an important clue to the effects of 'space weather' on Earth’s magnetic field.
Shortly after 15:34 CEST, something set the tail of Earth’s natural cloak of magnetism oscillating. "It was like the waves created by a boat travelling across a lake," says Dr Tielong Zhang of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Graz.
Only in this case, the identity of the 'boat' is unknown. It might be the fast flow of particles often observed in the central part of the magnetotail. Whatever it was produced waves that travelled from the centre of the tail to its outer edges.
The five spacecraft caught in this event were the four units of ESA’s Cluster mission and the first unit of the joint CNSA/ESA mission Double Star. The Cluster quartet fly in formation, passing through Earth’s magnetotail at distances of between 16 and 19 times Earth’s radius.
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One of the two spacecraft of Double Star, the TC-1 spacecraft, orbits at between 10 and 13 Earth radii. All five spacecraft are designed to collect data on the magnetic bubble surrounding our planet, called the 'magnetosphere'.
Picture above is encoded link and picture below shows: Artistic view of the neutral sheet oscillations observed in the magnetotail by the four Cluster spacecraft (in blue) and the Double Star TC-1 spacecraft in red.
(Credit: ESA)
The Cluster - TC-1 Observing Neutral Sheet Oscillations
