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9 - Solar wind–magnetosphere coupling
Summary
As our technological society has advanced, we have made greater and greater use of the Earth’s magnetosphere to host our increasingly sophisticated instruments on our monitoring, communication, and global-positioning satellites. The magnetosphere is usually a benign host, but it can be energized greatly by the solar wind and become quite inhospitable, affecting not just systems in space, but even those on the surface of the Earth. Fortunately, we have learned much about the magnetosphere and its control by the solar wind since the early days of the space age when James Van Allen and his co-workers discovered that space was “radioactive.”
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- Space PhysicsAn Introduction, pp. 275 - 314Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016