Known as a downdraft tower, the project by Solar Wind Energy, Inc.
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Subsequent missions will analyse the solar wind, three comets and the planet Mercury.
Also, changes in the speed and pressure of the solar wind cause the termination shock to expand, contract and ripple.
In 2008 and 2009, the sun set Space Age records for low sunspot counts, weak solar wind, and low solar irradiance.
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Genesis had painstakingly deployed the collector tiles and foil over the last two years to capture atoms from the solar wind.
As a result, it is bombarded by the solar wind and this might have resulted in the loss of water and oxygen.
In addition to these goodies, the solar wind carries light elements such as helium to the moon's surface and leaves them there.
During a short cycle the solar wind (a breeze of electrically charged gas blowing off the sun's surface) is stronger than normal.
An analysis of the solar wind is expected to provide clues about the composition of the sun and origins of our solar system.
On its own, the pressure exerted by the protons and electrons of the solar wind is even more feeble than the photon pressure.
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It is packed with scientific instruments such as a miniaturised camera, an infra-red spectrometer and sensors to measure solar wind and other electrical currents.
Instead of relying on photon pressure, it would enable a spacecraft to be pushed along by the charged particles of the solar wind itself.
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When the sun is at its most active, which is when it is spotty, the solar wind is stronger and fewer cosmic rays penetrate.
The planet and its neighbours are bathed in the solar wind, a stream of charged particles ejected from the upper atmosphere of the sun.
Understanding exactly what the Geotail does (something to do with measuring the solar wind's interaction with the Earth's magnetosphere) may require a background in heliophysics.
These craft will study the interaction between the solar wind (the breeze of electrically charged particles emitted by the sun) and the earth's magnetic field.
And when the solar wind is stronger, it is better at shielding the earth from high-energy charged particles from outer space known as cosmic rays.
Such a big sail would catch a lot of solar wind.
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The rays can damage satellite electronics, and if current solar wind conditions persist, engineers would have to take this into account when deciding how to "harden" their spacecraft.
Effects stemming from the Earth's atmosphere, from ocean tides and from the solar wind of charged particles were all found to be too small to explain the spacecrafts' extra velocity.
"When they come close to the Sun, this ice melts - solar wind blows this material out into space, so you get a tail of matter coming off the comet, " explains O'Brien.
The good news is that many of the sensitive wafers which had been collecting particles of solar wind (charged atoms and molecules that stream out of the sun) survived the subsequent crash intact.
The most persuasive evidence that Voyager 1 has crossed the termination shock is its measurement of a sudden increase in the strength of the magnetic field carried by the solar wind, combined with an inferred decrease in its speed.
There will also, according to Charlie Bolden, NASA's administrator, be a mission to the sun, to study the solar wind, and one to improve the agency's ability to detect and catalogue interesting (but potentially dangerous) asteroids that pass near Earth.
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The Sun's magnetic field and solar wind - mainly in the form of electrons and protons coming out of the Sun - protects the entire Solar System by acting as a sort of shield from cosmic rays (very energetic particles and radiation from outer space).
Solar Wind Energy (which used to be called Clean Wind Energy Tower, Inc.) is negotiating for a lease from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for a 1, 700-acre parcel of flat, empty desert on the Mexican border, right next to an Air Force bombing range.
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It also can throw a monkey in solar and wind developers efforts to obtain state approvals for their projects and scare off bankers and investors needed to finance what are often multibillion-dollar solar power plants and wind farms.
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Indeed, various companies, including GE, are investing heavily in ways to come up with cost-effective systems to store the wind and solar energy that their wind turbines and solar technologies capture in combination with other means of generating electricity and power.
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