Two upcoming NASA missions to study space weather threatening Earth

Two new aurora exploration missions from the Sun and Earth could significantly improve our understanding of the complex interactions responsible for Potentially dangerous space weather.

The Northern Lights seen at the high northern and southern latitudes of our planet can be very beautiful, but the phenomena and processes responsible for these spectacular light shows are known to interfere with our communication signals and our utility networks. Experts fear this severe spatial weather, in the form of powerful geomagnetic storms, will do much worse, eliminating portable devices, fleets of satellites and transformers responsible for transmitting electricity through power grids.

A geomagnetic storm of this magnitude did not hit Earth since in the 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’re not very good at predicting this stuff, whether it’s the mundane daily space weather or the scary. kind that occurs once every 100 years.

This is where these two new heliophysical missions come in, as they will help us better “understand the Sun and the Earth as an interconnected system”. according to at 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 are responsible for geomagnetic storms. Insights from these missions will enhance our forecasting capabilities, giving us a potential head start in stormy weather.

For the EUVST, or Extreme Ultraviolet High-Throughput Spectroscopic Telescope Epsilon Mission, a spacecraft will analyze the spectrum of our star’s extreme ultraviolet radiation. He will study how the solar wind emerges from the Sun’s atmosphere, or corona, how stellar material travels through space. Scientists will use this data to determine how these processes affect the solar system, including Earth’s atmosphere.

This “new generation solar observation satellite”Will have the highest resolution and sensitivity of any previous UV spectrometer, according to the project website. These abilities could unravel the different ways in which magnetic and plasma processes produce coronary heating and enormous 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 guide telescope, software and an imaging system to contextualize the spectrographic measurements. Harry Warren of the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington will be the principal investigator. The launch of UVUST is scheduled for 2026.

The second mission, the Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer, or EZIE, will involve three cubesats in Earth orbit. EZIE, with a budget of $ 53.3 million, will study the electrical currents in the Earth’s atmosphere associated with auroral activity and the magnetosphere of our planet. The satellites will study the auroral electrojet –an electric current which reaches the magnetosphere and passes through the atmosphere at altitudes between 60 and 90 miles (97-145 km) –to determine how and why it is changing over time.

Jeng-Hwa Yee of Johns Hopkins University will be the principal investigator.

“Despite decades of research, we still don’t understand the basic pattern of electric currents that are central to interactions between Earth and surrounding space,” Yee said in a Johns Hopkins declaration. “This is a problem of universal importance since it applies to any magnetized body such as Mercury, Saturn and Jupiter – but it is also of practical importance since these currents have a profound impact on our technologies in space and here on Earth. ”

The launch of EZIE is scheduled for around June 2024.

“We are very pleased to add these new missions to the growing fleet of satellites that study our Sun-Earth system using an incredible array of unprecedented observation tools,” Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator for the science at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.vs., 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 heliophysics, both for scientific and practical reasons.. Research in 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.