Two new missions to explore the solar and earth auroras can significantly improve our understanding of the complex interactions potentially dangerous space weather.
Auroras that can be seen at the northern and southern high latitudes of our planet can be very beautiful, but the phenomena and processes responsible for these dramatic light shows are known to affect our communication signals and utilities. Experts fear that severe space weather, in the form of powerful geomagnetic storms, will perform much worse by eliminating handheld devices, satellites and transformers responsible for the transmission of electricity through power grids.
A geomagnetic storm of this scale did not hit the earth since the middle of the 19th century, but scientists have reason to believe that we will experience a similar event at some point in the future. The problem is: we are not very good at predicting this kind of thing, whether it’s the everyday space weather or the scary kind of what happens once every 100 years.
This is where these two new heliophysical missions come in, because they will help us better understand the sun and the earth as an interconnected system, ‘ according to to NASA. To do so, the new satellites will study the physics behind things like solar winds, solar flares and coronal mass ejections, the latter of which are responsible for geomagnetic storms. Insights into these missions will improve our predictive ability and enable us to prevent incoming storms.
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For the EUVST mission, or Extreme Ultraviolet High-Throughput Spectroscopic Telescope Epsilon Mission, a spacecraft will analyze the spectrum of our star’s extreme ultraviolet radiation. It will study how solar wind comes out of the atmosphere of the sun, or corona, how stellar material propagates in space. Scientists will use this data to determine the ways in which these processes affect the solar system, including the Earth’s atmosphere.
This “next generation solar observing satellite“According to the project website, will have the highest resolution and sensitivity of any previous UV spectrometer. These capabilities can disrupt the various ways in which magnetic and plasma processes cause coronal heating, and tremendous releases of energy.
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will lead the EUVST mission while working with partners in the United States and Europe. NASA will contribute $ 55 million to the project, which will cover a UV detector, spare parts for the spectrograph, a guide telescope, software and an imaging system to contextualize spectrographic measurements. Harry Warren of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington will serve as chief investigator. The launch of EUVUST is expected in 2026.
The second mission, the Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer, or EZIE, will involve three cube sets in Earth orbit. EZIE, with a budget of $ 53.3 million, will study the electric currents in the Earth’s atmosphere related to auroral activity and the planet’s magnetosphere. The satellites will investigate the auroral electrojet –an electric current extending into the magnetosphere and through the atmosphere at altitudes between 60 and 90 mi (97-145 km) –to determine how and why it changes over time.
Jeng-Hwa Yee at Johns Hopkins University will serve as principal investigator.
“Despite decades of research, we still do not understand the basic configuration of the electric currents that are central to the interaction between the earth and the surrounding space,” Yee said in a Johns Hopkins. statement. ‘This is a problem of universal importance, as it applies to any magnetized body such as Mercury, Saturn and Jupiter – but it is also practically important, as these currents have a major impact on our technology in space and here on earth.’
The launch of EZIE is expected around June 2024.
“We are very pleased to add these new missions to the growing fleet of satellites studying our Sun-Earth system using an amazing array of unprecedented observation tools,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, co-administrator of science at NASA headquarters. in Washington, D.C., said in a NASA statement.
It will take years before we see the results of these missions, but it is important that we do this space-based heliophysics, for both scientific and practical reasons.. Research from 2017 has suggested that a sufficiently powerful geomagnetic storm could cost the United States more than $ 40 billion a day due to damaged technology and global-scale eclipses.