Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Earth is surrounded by a protective magnetic environment — the magnetosphere —shown here in blue, which deflects a supersonic stream of charged particles from the Sun, known as the solar wind. As the particles flow around the Earth’s magnetosphere, it forms a highly turbulent boundary layer called the magnetosheath, shown in yellow. Scientists, like those involved with NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, are studying this turbulent region to help us learn more about our dynamic space environment.