MAPPING INTERPLANETARY WEATHER

During the last thirty years observations made on spacecraft travelling far beyond the magnetosphere have greatly advanced our knowledge of conditions in space between the Sun and the Earth. However, spacecraft can only sample the solar wind locally and there are generally so few of them present at any one time that it is not possible to obtain a global view of interplanetary weather patterns. Ground-based observations of a large grid of radio galaxies are now being used to map disturbances as they move across interplanetary space and this novel technique is providing new insights into the phenomena of interplanetary weather.