In March 1989, a torrent of high-energy particles emitted from the sun collided into the Earth's magnetic field more than 60,000 kilometers above ground.

Then, in a devastating moment, everything went black.

200 transformers shut down or were destroyed, causing a blackout from areas in Quebec all the way to California. Millions of dollars were spent in repairs.

What had happened was a mysterious but common occurrence: the collision of high-energy particles into the Earth's magnetic field had caused a surge of energy.

In this case, the collision sent a powerful stream of current through power lines, blowing transformers and disrupting the flow of electricity.

At the time of the Quebec blackout, scientists' power to predict geomagnetic storms was limited.

Scientists then had limited ability to track and predict the activity of solar emissions in the Earth's magnetic field, since most satellites that measure solar activity were located inside the Earth's magnetic field.

The intensity of the magnetosphere disruptions varies across space.

"Some small blob of mass leaves the Sun, and travels out through space, and we don't know quite what direction, how big it is, or how fast it's travelling," Gary Heckman, chief of the Space Environment Services Division of NOAA, the U.S. government's weather and atmospheric information arm, said to the New York Times in 1989.

"We don't know the density, so we don't know how much energy it has in it. And we don't know the orientation of the field," he told the Times then.

But today, a satellite called Polar is helping scientists better understand and predict the flows of geomagnetic storms.

A group of instruments on Polar, called Ceppad, are implementing a fairly new technique called neutral atom imaging to identify the location and intensity geomagnetic activity.

As the name suggests, the method works by sensing neutral atoms after rare collisions between magnetospheric ions and atoms that have escaped from the Earth's atmosphere.

But the rarity of the collisions, and the fact that the sensors cannot detect every collision, keeps individual images of geomagnetic storms fairly crude.

But scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the same lab that was chatered to develop the first nuclear weapons more than a half century ago, have been able to create much sharper images by combining individual "scenes" taken by Polar's instruments into clearer and more detailed composite images.

The effects of composite imaging can be seen in this progression of Abraham Lincoln's face.

Those images can be used to track geomagnetic storms and better equip space weather forecasters to warn of coming dangers.

Blackouts are not the only dangerous scenario that geomagnetic storms can spawn.

The world's fleet of satellites -- which allow for communications, tracking, and space research -- can malfunction or shut off if hit by high energy particles from the sun.

The same goes for humans. Humans in space can be injured or killed by changes in radiation levels.

For these reasons, NOAA, which stands for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, maintains a space environment center that tracks and publishes, free of charge, the latest patterns of space weather.

The administration uses findings from about a dozen satellites and about 150 ground stations around the world to measure variations in the magnetic field, according to Ernie Hildner, the director of NOAA's Space Environment Center in Boulder, Co.

The Polar satellite, launched in February 1996, has already begun to shed some light on the types of geomagnetic storms.

While it was once thought that strong storms were composed of a group of smaller sub-storms, the Ceppad instrument has shown that storms and sub-storms are distinct entities.

In fact, sub-storms are just as intense as storms, but are not as completely absorbed into the magnetosphere as storms.

The progression of a substorm.

The progression of a storm: more powerful.

"That was sort of a surprise," said Geoff Reeves, a scientist who works with Ceppad at Los Alamos. "Most people had assumed that the storm-time injections were more intense than substorm injections."

Los Alamos is designing other neutral atom imaging instruments for future space missions. NASA's IMAGE satellite, set for launch in February, and the TWINS satellite, set for launch in 2002, will help scientists better image the magnetosphere.

The laboratory, which was founded in the 1940s to develop the first nuclear weapons, researches the magnetosphere for its relationship to national security.

Los Alamos researches want to be able to tell the difference between a natural disruption in the magnetosphere and a disruption caused by a nuclear blast.

"Los Alamos got into this business because they were chartered to determine whether or not anybody was having atmospheric nuclear tests," said NOAA's Hildner. "But its a wonderful complementary activity with the civilian space weather needs."