A team of NASA scientists detected the ambipolar electric field for the first time with a suborbital rocket 150 miles above Earth’s atmosphere, the space agency said.
The ambipolar electric field is a “weak, planet-wide electric field as fundamental as Earth’s gravity and magnetic fields” that lifts the sky and is responsible for the polar winds, NASA said
Although there have been theories about its existence for 60 years, the mission was the first time it was confirmed, the agency said in findings published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
It will now help scientists learn more about life on Earth — and possibly beyond.
“Understanding the complex movements and evolution of our planet’s atmosphere provides clues not only to the history of Earth but also gives us insight into the mysteries of other planets and determining which ones might be hospitable to life,” NASA said.
This major scientific breakthrough has confirmed that our planet has three electric fields surrounding it: gravity, the magnetic field — which protects Earth from cosmic radiation — and the ambipolar electric field.
The electric field was first theorized by scientists over 60 years ago when spacecraft flying over Earth’s poles began to detect “a stream of particles flowing from our atmosphere into space,” according to NASA.
“Something had to be drawing these particles out of the atmosphere,” said Glyn Collinson, the principal investigator of endurance at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
However, with the limitations of technology, scientists could not ever confirm the theory.
In 2016, Collinson and his team invented a new instrument they thought could measure Earth’s ambipolar field — a suborbital rocket they dubbed “Endurance” — after decades of scientists puzzled by the mystery.
“There must be some invisible force lurking there responsible for this outflow, but we’ve never been able to measure it because we didn’t have the technology,” Collinson explained.
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They launched the rocket into the ambipolar electric field at Ny-Alesund in Svalbard, Norway, just a few hundred miles from the North Pole.
“Svalbard is the only rocket range in the world where you can fly through the polar wind and make the measurements we needed,” said Suzie Imber, a space physicist at the University of Leicester and co-author of the paper.
Endurance — named after the ship that carried Ernest Shackleton on his voyage to Antarctica in 1914 — was launched and reached an altitude of 477.23 miles on May 11, 2022.
The field has been challenging to detect because it is fragile, only producing 0.55 volts.
“A half a volt is almost nothing — it’s only about as strong as a watch battery,” Collinson said. “But that’s just the right amount to explain the polar wind.”