Two new missions to explore the auroras of the Sun and the Earth would enhance our understanding of the complex interactions responsible for potentially dangerous space again.
Auroras seen in 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 interfere with our communication signals and power grids. Experts fear Which heavy space weather, in the form of powerful geomagnetic storms, will do much worse, disabling handheld devices, satellite fleets, and transformers responsible for transmitting electricity through electricity grids.
A geomagnetic storm of this magnitude has not hit Earth since mid-19th century, but scientists have reason to believe that we will see a similar event sometime in the future. The problem is, we’re not very good at predicting things like this, whether it’s the mundane space weather or the scary kind that happens once every 100 years.
That’s where these two new heliophysical missions will come in handy, as they will help us to “better understand the sun and the Earth as an interconnected system”, according to to NASA. To do this, the new satellites will investigate the physics behind things like solar winds, solar flares and coronal mass ejections, the latter of which are responsible for geomagnetic storms. Insights from these missions will improve our forecasting capabilities, potentially giving us a head start on upcoming stormy weather.
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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 emerges from the sun’s atmosphere, or corona, how stellar material propagates in space. Scientists will use this data to determine how these processes affect the solar system, including the Earth’s atmosphere.
This “next generation solar observation satelliteWill have the highest resolution and sensitivity of any previous UV spectrometer, according to project website. These possibilities could disentangle the different ways in which magnetic and plasma processes produce coronal heating and massive energy release.
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will lead the EUVST mission in collaboration with partners in the United States and Europe. NASA will contribute $ 55 million to the project, which will include a UV detector, parts for the spectrograph, a guide telescope, software and an imaging system to contextualize spectrographic measurements. Harry Warren of the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington will act as principal investigator. The launch of EUVUST is expected in 2026.
The second mission, the Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer, or EZIE, involves three cubesats orbiting Earth. EZIE, with a budget of $ 53.3 million, will study the electric currents in Earth’s atmosphere associated with auroral activity and our planet’s magnetosphere. The satellites will investigate the auroral electrojet –an electric current that reaches into the magnetosphere and through the atmosphere at altitudes between 60 and 90 miles (97-145 km) –to determine how and why it changes over time.
Jeng-Hwa Yee of 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 interactions between Earth and 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 of practical importance as these currents have a profound impact on our technologies in space and here on Earth.”
EZIE is expected to launch around June 2024.
“We are very excited to add these new missions to the growing fleet of satellites studying our Sun-Earth system using an amazing array of unprecedented observation tools,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., said in a NASA statement.
It will be 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 suggested that a sufficiently powerful geomagnetic storm could cost the United States more than $ 40 billion a day due to damaged technology and global power outages.