Solar Wind – Spaceflight Now

DSCOVR resumes operations after eight-month outage

March 5, 2020 Stephen Clark

The Deep Space Climate Observatory has resumed regular observations after NOAA and NASA engineers uplinked a software patch to the spacecraft a million miles from Earth, restoring data on space weather and a daily series views of the sunlit side of our home planet.

Parker Solar Probe sets records during first encounter with the sun

November 6, 2018 Stephen Clark

Less than three months after its fiery departure from Cape Canaveral, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe flew within 15 million miles (24 million kilometers) of the sun Monday for the $1.5 billion mission’s first close-up solar encounter.

Scientists say thinning atmosphere drove the drying and cooling of Mars

March 27, 2017 Stephen Clark

Data collected by NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft in its first two years at Mars confirm suspicions that the solar wind is blasting away the planet’s atmosphere and helped transform the world from a warmer, wetter and potentially habitable world into the barren landscape seen today, scientists said.