Pingie: HTTP:: MESSENGER Catches Unique Solar Flare

HTTP:: MESSENGER Catches Unique Solar Flare
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The NASA MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging (MESSENGER) probe has just recently performed its third flyby of Mercury, and it is currently heading on a course that will allow it to be captured in the planet's orbit in early 2011. As it passed close to the planet after one of its third approaches, the spacecraft's instruments started recording a large number of high-energy solar neutrons, which is amazing, considering that this is the first time these particles have been studied within a distance range smaller than one astronomical unit (AU) from the Sun, Space Fellowship reports. The solar flare was detected by the spacecraft on December 31, 2007, as it was cruising about half of one AU away from the Sun. The readings obtained by the spectrometers aboard the probe helped astronomers finally figure out why some coronal mass ejections produced little to no energetic protons, whereas others did. “What [the observations are] telling us is that at le!
ast some moderate-sized flares continuously produce high-energy neutrons in the solar corona. From this fact, we inferred the continuous production of protons in the 30-to-100-MeV (million electron volt) range due to the flare,” Planetary Science Institute scientist William C. Feldman says. “So the important results are that perh...
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http://news.softpedia.com/news/MESSENGER-Catches-Unique-Solar-Flare-125409.shtml
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