CGEM is a NASA/NSF funded Living With a Star Strategic Capability between UC Berkeley, Stanford University and Lockheed Martin Space and Astrophysics Laboratory.

CGEM’s goal is to improve our understanding of the corona of the Sun — to develop and evaluate a model for the evolution of its magnetic field.

The most violent space weather events such as eruptive solar flares and coronal mass ejections are driven by the release of free magnetic energy stored in the solar corona. Once released this energy propagates through interplanetary space, frequently impacting the Earth’s space environment. How is this energy stored? This is a fundamental question to predict space weather. Yet current data-driven space-weather models have been unable to realistically answer that.