A planetary perspective on Earth’s space environment evolution

Abstract

The planet Earth is an integrated system, in which its multi‐spheres are coupled, from the space to the inner core. Whether the space environment in short to long terms has been controlled by the earth's interior process is contentious. In the past several decades, space weather and space climate have been extensively studied based on either observation data measured directly by man‐made instruments or ancient data inferred indirectly from some historical medium of past thousands of years. The acquired knowledge greatly helps us to understand the dynamic processes in the space environment of modern Earth, which has a strong magnetic dipole and an oxygen‐rich atmosphere. However, no data is available for ancient space weather and climate (>5 ka). Here, we propose to take the advantage of “space‐diversity” to build a “generalized planetary space family”, to reconcile the ancient space environment evolution of planet Earth from modern observations of other planets in our solar system. Such a method could also in turn give us a valuable insight into other planets' evolution.

Ionospheric Trend Over Wuhan During 1947–2017: Comparison Between Simulation and Observation

“…The fortunate thing is that the main long‐term drivers of ionosphere and thermosphere including solar radiation, CO 2 , and geomagnetic field could be derived from dendrochronological dated radiocarbon concentrations, rocks, ice core, and sediment (Fischer et al, ; Korte et al, ; Solanki et al, ). As demonstrated in this paper, theoretical model driven by those realistic drivers could be a potential way to reconstruct the ancient ionospheric electron density (Wei et al, ).…”

Middle and near ultraviolet spectrograph of the Scientific Experimental system in Near SpacE (SENSE)

“…From 2020 to 2022, the MN-UVS was deployed in several balloon-based experiments, especially with biological exposure instruments. The UV spectra obtained by the MN-UVS will provide important information for near-space astrobiology research and in studies of radiation transportation in Earth's atmosphere (e.g., Zhang JQ et al, 2019;Shen JX et al, 2022) and can potentially be applied to the near space of other planets (Wei Y et al, 2017). More balloon-based experiments will be conducted in the future to characterize in detail the properties of background UV radiation at different regions, different altitudes, and different solar zenith angles.…”

Simulated Long‐Term Evolution of the Ionosphere During the Holocene

“…On the one hand, the reconstructed ionosphere could be used as a database for other studies, such as space environmental evolution (e.g., Wei et al., 2017). On the other hand, our detailed analysis is valuable for future prediction.…”