The Heliosphere

In this segment of our video book, we cover the Sentinels of the Heliosphere fleet; the distance to the edge of our Sun’s solar wind; the Aurora Borealis, Comets, the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud. We start by defining the limits of the Sun’s influence, including the Termination Shock, Heliopause, Heliosheath, and the Bow Shock. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 progress is reviewed. Next, we cover the near-Earth fleet of satellites Hinode, RHESSI, TRACE, and FAST; the Magnetosphere satellites Cluster 1 through 4 plus Geotail; the Sun observers Stereo A and Stereo B; the solar wind observers orbiting Lagrange Point 1 – ACE, Wind, and SOHO; and back to the Magnetosphere with THEMIS A through E; and back again to Voyager 1 and 2. We conclude with a look at the big November 2011 solar storm observed by Stereo. We then cover the nature of the aurora Borealis and aurora Australis. This includes the Bohr atomic model where we explain the quantum jumps in high altitude Oxygen atoms that create photons. Next we cover what a comet is and the history of comets including the Great Comet of 1577 studied by Tycho Brahe and the many comets that became Halley’s Comet. We then examine comet orbits including the long period comets Siding Spring, Hale-Bopp and Lovejoy 2014, and the short period comets 67P, Encke and Halley’s Comet. These two kinds of comet orbits along with evaporating comets leads us to the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud as areas that generate new comets. We end the segment on comets with a look at Shoemaker Levy crashing into Jupiter and the Rosetta Mission to 67P. We conclude with a review of the Solar System distances we have covered in this and the previous segments.