Two new missions to study solar and Earth auroras could significantly improve our understanding of the complex interactions involved dangerous space weather.
Auroras seen at high altitudes north and south of our planet can be very beautiful, but the onions and the processes that are responsible for these amazing light displays are known to interfere with the communication signals and our convenience grids. Experts fear sin extreme space weather, in the form of powerful geomagnetic storms, it will do much worse, dismantling handheld devices, satellite fleets, and transformers with responsibility for sending electricity through power grids.
A geomagnetic storm of this scale has not hit the Earth since then mid-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 type of stuff, whether it is daily bad weather or the dreaded scare. kind of happens once every 100 years.
That’s where these two new heliophysics missions come in, because they will help us “understand the sun and the earth as an interconnected system,” according to to NASA. To do this, the new satellites will study the physics behind things like solar winds, solar flares, and coronal mass ejections, the latter of which rely on geomagnetic storms. Insights from these missions improve our prediction capabilities, allowing us to keep up with some incoming stormy weather.
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For the EUVST mission, or Epsilon Mission High-throughput Extreme Ultraviolet High-throughput Spectroscopic Telescope, a spacecraft studies our star’s true ultraviolet radiation spectrum. It examines how a solar wind emerges from the solar atmosphere, or corona, as stellar material propagates into space. Scientists will use this data to determine the ways in which these processes affect the solar system, including the Earth’s atmosphere.
This is “next generation solar observation satellite“Any UV spectrum will have the highest resolution and sensitivity before, according to the project website. These capabilities could solve the various ways in which magnetic and plasma processes produce coronary heating and extreme energy emissions.
The 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, parts for the spectrograph, a guiding telescope, software, and an imaging system to put spectral measurements into context. Harry Warren from the U.S. marine research laboratory in Washington will be the lead investigator. EUVUST is expected to launch in 2026.
The second mission, the Zeeman Electrojet Imaging Explorer, or EZIE, will involve three cubes in Earth’s orbit. EZIE, with a budget of $ 53.3 million, will study the electric currents in the Earth’s atmosphere related to the auroral and magnetosphere activity of our planet. The satellites examine the auroral electrojet—an electric current that enters and passes through the magnetosphere atmosphere at altitudes between 60 and 90 miles (97-145 km) –to find out how and why it changes over time.
Jeng-Hwa Yee will be at Johns Hopkins University as principal investigator.
“Despite decades of study, we still do not understand the basic arrangement of the electric currents that are at the heart of the interaction between the Earth and the surrounding space,” said Yee in Johns Hopkins recitation. “This is a very important problem as it applies to any magnetic group such as Mercury, Saturn and Jupiter – but it is also important in practice as these currents have a huge impact on our technologies in the world. space and here on Earth. ”
The launch of EZIE is expected around June 20th.
“We are delighted to add these new missions to the growing fleet of satellites exploring our Sun-Earth system using an incredible selection of unprecedented observers,” he said. 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 messages, but it is important that we do the heliophysics based on this place, both for scientific and practical purposes.. Research from 2017 suggested that a powerful enough geomagnetic storm could cost the United States more than $ 40 billion per day as a result of damaging technology and global blackouts.