Spectacular solar storms

Curiosity's handlers put the rover on standby after the sun unleashed a medium-strength flare in the Red Planet's direction on March 5. It's the second recent shutdown for Curiosity, which had just come out of protective "safe mode" on March 2 as engineers work through an issue with its primary computer system.

A long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the Sun's atmosphere, the corona, erupts out into space at 4:36 p.m. EDT on August 31, 2012. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled at over 900 miles per second. The CME did not travel directly toward Earth, but did connect with Earth's magnetic environment, or magnetosphere, causing aurora to appear on the night of September 3, 2012. The image above includes an image of Earth to show the size of the CME compared to the size of Earth. REUTERS/NASA/GSFC/SDO/Handout less

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| Photo by NASA

Fri, Sep 7, 2012 8:00 AM AST (Arabian)