Two new missions to explore the Sun and the auroras of the Earth could greatly improve our understanding of complex responsible interactions potentially dangerous space time.
The auroras seen at the northern and southern high latitudes of our planet can be very beautiful, but it is known that the phenomena and processes responsible for these dramatic light shows interfere with our signals and communication networks. expert fear that severe space weather, in the form of strong geomagnetic storms, it will go much worse, eliminating portable devices, satellite fleets and transformers responsible for transmitting electricity through electricity networks.
A geomagnetic storm of this scale did not hit the Earth since in the mid-nineteenth century, but scientists have reason to believe that we will experience a similar event at some point in the future. The problem is that we are not very good at predicting this kind of thing, whether it is daily space weather or scary genre that happens once every 100 years.
This is where these two new heliophysics missions come in, as they will help us “better understand the Sun and the Earth as an interconnected system.” according NASA. To do this, the new satellites will investigate the physics behind things such as solar winds, solar flares and coronal mass ejections, the latter being responsible for geomagnetic storms. The prospects of these missions will improve our forecasting skills, giving us a potential head in stormy weather.
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For the EUVST mission, or the Epsilon mission of the high-speed ultraviolet spectroscopic telescope, a spacecraft will analyze the spectrum of our star’s extreme ultraviolet radiation. It will study how the solar wind comes out of the atmosphere or the corona of the Sun, how the 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 satellite“It will have the highest resolution and sensitivity of any previous UV spectrometer, according to the project’s website. These capabilities could handle the various ways in which magnetic and plasma processes produce coronal heating and extraordinary energy releases.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will lead the EUVST mission while collaborating with partners in the United States and Europe. NASA will contribute $ 55 million to the project, which will cover a UV detector, spectrograph parts, a guiding telescope, software and an imaging system for contextualizing spectrographic measurements. Harry Warren of the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington will be the lead investigator. The launch of EUVUST is expected in 2026.
The second mission, Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer, or EZIE, will involve three cubes in Earth orbit. EZIE, with a budget of 53.3 million dollars, will study the electric currents in the Earth’s atmosphere associated with the auroral activity and the magnetosphere of our planet. Satellites will investigate auroral electrojet –an electric current that reaches the magnetosphere and passes through the zipper 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 electric currents that are essential to the interactions between Earth and space,” Yee said in a Johns Hopkins statement. “This is a matter of universal importance, because it applies to any magnetized body, such as Mercury, Saturn and Jupiter – but it also has a practical importance, because these currents have a profound impact on our technologies in space and here on Earth. “
The launch of EZIE is expected around June 2024.
“We are thrilled to add these new missions to the growing fleet of satellites studying our Sun-Earth system using an astonishing array of observational tools,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA’s Washington, D.C.C., said in a NASA statement.
It will be years before we see the results of these missions, but it is important to do this space heliophysics, both for scientific and practical reasons.. Research in 2017 has suggested that a strong enough geomagnetic storm could cost the United States more than $ 40 billion a day as a result of damaged technology and global disruptions.