Bursting Earth's Bubble: Artificial Intelligence Helps Find Magnetic Eruptions in Space

MMS look for explosive reconnection events as it flies through the magnetopause -- the boundary region where Earth's magnetic butts up against the solar wind that flows throughout the solar system. An alert pops up in your email: The latest spacecraft observations are ready. You now have 24 hours to scour 84 hours-worth of data, selecting the most promising split-second moments you can find. The data points you choose, depending on how you rank them, will download from the spacecraft in the highest possible resolution; researchers may spend months analyzing them. Everything else will be overwritten like it was never collected at all.