NASA’s SPHEREx and PUNCH missions are set to launch together, with one mission aiming to answer big-picture questions about our universe and the other seeking a better understanding of our Sun.
SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) is an infrared space telescope designed to map the entire sky like none before it. SPHEREx will study the origins of the universe, galaxies, and the ingredients for life in our galaxy.
PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) is a constellation of four small satellites dedicated to studying the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the solar corona, and how it extends into space to form the solar wind. Understanding these processes is critical to predicting space weather and its impact on Earth’s magnetic field.
Together, SPHEREx and PUNCH demonstrate NASA’s commitment to uncovering the fundamental forces that shape our universe and our own star.
At the start of this new year, close-up pictures and solar flare data that the ESA-led Solar Orbiter mission has been recording for more than three years. See and hear for yourself how the number of flares and their intensity increase, a clear sign of the Sun approaching the peak of the 11-year solar cycle.
This video combines ultraviolet images of the Sun’s outer atmosphere (the corona, yellow) taken by Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument, with the size and locations of solar flares (blue circles) as recorded by the Spectrometer/Telescope for Imaging X-rays (STIX) instrument. The accompanying audio is a sonification based on the detected flares and the spacecraft’s distance to the Sun.
Solar Orbiter moves on an elliptical path around the Sun, making a close approach to our star every six months. We can see this in the video from the spacecraft’s perspective, with the Sun moving closer and farther over the course of each year. In the sonification, this is represented by the low background humming that loudens as the Sun gets closer and becomes quieter as it moves further away. (There are some abrupt shifts in distance visible in the video, as it skips over dates where one or both instruments were inactive or collecting a different type of data.)
The blue circles represent solar flares: bursts of high-energy radiation of which STIX detects the X-rays. Flares are sent out by the Sun when energy stored in ‘twisted’ magnetic fields (usually above sunspots) is suddenly released. The size of each circle indicates how strong the flare is, with stronger flares sending out more X-rays. We can hear the flares in the metallic clinks in the sonification, where the sharpness of the sound corresponds to how energetic the solar flare is.
Many thanks to Klaus Nielsen (DTU Space / Maple Pools) for making the sonification in this video. If you would like to hear more sonifications and music by this artist, please visit: https://linktr.ee/maplepools Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA, operated by ESA.
————————————————— Credits Credit: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI & STIX, Klaus Nielsen (DTU Space/Maple Pools) Acknowledgements: Data processing for video by Laura Hayes License: CC BY-SA 3.0 or ESA Standard License
Video credit slate Solar Orbiter animation: ESA Sun images: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI Solar flare data: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/STIX Data processing for video: Laura Hayes Data sonification & music: Klaus Nielsen (DTU Space/Maple Pools) —————————————————
★ Subscribe: http://bit.ly/ESAsubscribe and click twice on the bell button to receive our notifications.
We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world. Check out https://www.esa.int/ to get up to speed on everything space related.
The double-satellite Proba-3 is the most ambitious member yet of ESA’s Proba family of experimental missions. Two spacecraft will fly together as one, maintaining precise formation down to a single millimetre. One will block out the fiery disc of the Sun for the other, to enable prolonged observations of the Sun’s surrounding atmosphere, or ‘corona’, the source of the solar wind and space weather. Usually, the corona can only be glimpsed for a few minutes during terrestrial total solar eclipses.
Proba-3 aims to reproduce such eclipses for up to six hours at a time, in a highly elliptical orbit taking it more than 60 000 km from Earth. The two spacecraft are being launched together by India’s PSLV-XL launcher from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre.
Join us on a unique video tour of the Sun’s mesmerising surface. Thanks to its innovative instrumentation and a ‘daring’ trajectory passing close to the Sun, ESA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft has obtained the highest-resolution full views of the Sun’s surface to date.
Watching the Sun in visible light, Solar Orbiter reveals a grainy surface and dark sunspots. On the same day, the spacecraft mapped the Sun’s magnetic field, tracked how fast and in which direction scorching hot material on the surface is moving, and snapped a hypnotising image in ultraviolet light of the Sun’s upper atmosphere, the corona. All taken on the same day, the four new images shown in this video let us peel away the Sun’s many layers.
The images were taken when Solar Orbiter was less than 74 million kilometres from the Sun; being so close meant each high-resolution image only covers a small portion of the Sun. To obtain the full-disc views showcased in the video, 25 images were stitched together like a mosaic. The Sun has a diameter of around 8000 pixels in the full mosaics, revealing an extraordinary amount of detail.
Credit: ESA – European Space Agency Acknowledgements: Sun images: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/PHI and EUI Teams; Solar Orbiter spacecraft animation: ESA/ATG medialab; Voiceover: Juliet Hannay
★ Subscribe: http://bit.ly/ESAsubscribe and click twice on the bell button to receive our notifications.
We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world. Check out https://www.esa.int/ to get up to speed on everything space related.
Space weather describes the changing environment throughout the Solar System, driven by the energetic and unpredictable nature of our Sun. Solar wind, solar flares and Coronal Mass Ejections can result in geomagetic storms on Earth, potentially damaging satellites in space and the technologies that rely on them, as well as infrastructure on the ground.
ESA’s future Lagrange mission will keep constant watch on the Sun. The satellite, located at the fifth Lagrange point, will send early warning of potentially harmful solar activity before it affects satellites in orbit or power grids on the ground, giving operators the time to act to protect vital infrastructure.
ESA is now working with European industry to assess options for the spacecraft and its mission, with initial proposals expected early in 2020.
As the US enjoyed a total solar eclipse on 21 August 2017, ESA’s Sun-watching Proba-2 satellite captured three partial eclipses from its viewpoint, 800 km above Earth. Proba-2 orbits Earth about 14.5 times per day, and thanks to the constant change in viewing angle, it dipped in and out of the Moon’s shadow several times during the solar eclipse.
The Proba-2 images were taken by the SWAP imager, and show the solar disc in extreme-ultraviolet light to capture its turbulent surface and swirling corona corresponding to temperatures of about a million degrees.
