Planetary plasmas and fields

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Abstract
In this presentation I shall dwell on what D. G. King‐Hele in his IUGG lecture on Satellite Geodesy has called ‘the unpleasant things that come from the sun with the solar wind.’ Unpleasant they can be, indeed: an astronaut in the wrong orbit through the earth's magnetosphere could be killed in a matter of days by a radiation belt overdose. A journey in a supersonic aircraft flying at stratospheric altitude along the edge of the polar cap during a big solar proton event could have drastic consequences for the passengers' future family planning. The absence of a fully developed protective magnetosphere during geomagnetic reversals in the past probably led to a variety of frightening changes in the upper atmosphere caused by the then unhindered inflow of 1,000,000°K hot solar wind plasma.

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