Around Earth’s equator, bright swaths of color known as airglow, can appear hovering at about 50 to 300 miles above the surface of Earth. These are the result of a complex interaction between Earth’s magnetic field lines – shown in this illustration as white lines connecting the North and South poles – and terrestrial weather. NASA’s ICON mission, led by a team at the University of California at Berkeley, will study such interactions in the near-Earth space environment.
Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Duberstein