A NASA spacecraft has made the clearest record yet of choruses of noise in the Earth’s magnetosphere.
The chirps and whoops were captured by one of NASA’s two recently launched Radiation Belt Storm Probes spacecraft, whose mission is to understand more about space weather.
“My wife calls it ‘alien birds,’” joked experiment principal investigator Craig Kletzing, an astronomer at the University of Iowa.
The twin RBSP spacecraft are exploring the magnetosphere, an area where solar particles add energy to the Earth’s magnetic environment, leading to a release of energy in the Van Allen radiation belt.
