Latest news with #spaceweather
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
University of Iowa launches first-of-its-kind space probe
A space mission led by professors from the University of Iowa launched in California on Wednesday. The 'TRACERS Spacecraft' was in development for eight years. The university held a launch party for everyone to watch it take off into orbit Wednesday afternoon. 'It's the first of its size and kind that's ever been led by the University of Iowa.' said Associate Professor for the Department of Physics and Astrology Allison Jaynes. Space always seems far away, but for the University of Iowa it's within reach. The university's physics and astronomy department led a mission with NASA to send up Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites, or TRACERS for short. The TRACERS work in a pair and help predict space weather. 'So, we have sort of a shield made of magnetic field around the Earth but some of that energy that comes from the sun in the form of a solar wind gets inside of that shield and we want to know when and where and how much energy gets in,' said Jaynes. Space weather may not seem like something that affects us on Earth, but it does have an impact on farmers. 'In Iowa specifically we use GPS-guided tractors to do all of our farming for example, and space weather can really mess up that signal, so we're hoping that with technology and missions like this we can better predict that space weather just like we predict terrestrial weather,' said Jaynes. Students worked alongside experts on the mission, and it was a learning experience for everyone. 'It was definitely intimidating at first but it's also very cool to see the behind-the -cenes of how the team structure works, how we're deciding the data comes down and the communication with NASA and all that, so I feel like I'm learning so much every week,' said graduate student Brendan Powers, who also worked on the space probes. The mission was successful. The TRACERS were let into orbit and the spaceship landed back on Earth in less than eight minutes. Jaynes described it as an 'ideal launch.' The satellites will orbit for about a year before they burn in the atmosphere. 027-David Miles speaks to a community gathering at the Space and Missile Technology Center, a museum commemorating historic rocket launches at Vandenberg. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Solve the daily Crossword
CBS News
6 days ago
- Science
- CBS News
NASA probes will study how solar wind triggers potentially dangerous "space weather"
SpaceX launched twin satellites for NASA Wednesday that will study how the electrically-charged solar wind interacts with Earth's magnetic field, creating constantly changing and occasionally dangerous "space weather" affecting satellites, electrical grids and other critical systems. The identical TRACERS satellites will operate in the magnetosphere, "the region around our Earth that is dominated by the planet's magnetic field, and it protects us from the stellar radiation and really from everything else that's going on in space," said Joseph Westlake, director of NASA's solar physics division. "What we will learn from TRACERS is critical for the understanding and eventually the predicting of how energy from our sun impacts the Earth and our space and ground-based assets, whether it be GPS or communication signals, power grids, space assets and our astronauts working up in space. "It's going to help us keep our way of life safe here on Earth." Hitching a ride to space along with TRACERS atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket were five other small satellites, including one that will use a new "polylingual" terminal to communicate with multiple other satellites and space probes using different protocols. Another will collect data about how much solar energy Earth absorbs and reemits into space, known as the "radiation budget," and another that will focus on how high-energy "killer electrons" are knocked out of the Van Allen radiation belts to rain down into the atmosphere. Two other small satellites were aboard, including an experimental "cubesat" that will test high-speed 5G communications technology in space and another built by an Australian company carrying five small satellites to test space-based air-traffic management technology that could provide aircraft tracking and communications anywhere in the world. The mission got underway at 2:13 p.m. EDT when a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket roared to life at launch complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base on the California coast. The launching one day late because of a regional power outage Tuesday that interrupted air traffic communications over the Pacific Ocean near Vandenberg. The second time around, the countdown ticked smoothly to zero and after boosting the upper stage and payloads out of the lower atmosphere, the first stage peeled away, reversed course and flew back to a landing near the launch pad. A few seconds later, the upper stage engine shut down to put the vehicle in its planned preliminary orbit. The two satellites making up the primary TRACERS payload were deployed about an hour-and-a-half after launch. Two of the other smallsats were to be released earlier in a slightly different orbit, with the remainder following TRACERS a few minutes later. TRACERS is an acronym for Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites. The twin spacecraft, built by Boeing, will fly in tandem in the same orbit, 10 seconds to two minutes apart, helping researchers precisely measure rapid changes indicating how the solar wind "couples" with Earth's magnetic field. "So the Sun is a burning, fiery ball of plasma and as it burns, it blows off an exhaust that we call the solar wind, it's a plasma, and that's always streaming from the sun towards the Earth," said David Miles, principal investigator at the University of Iowa. "And sometimes, the magnetic field of the Earth basically stands it off in the same way that if you have a rock in a stream, the water kind of flows around it. But other times, those two systems couple (and) you dump mass, energy and momentum into the Earth system." That coupling drives spectacular auroral displays, "but it also drives some of the negative things that we want to... understand and mitigate, like unplanned electrical currents in our electrical grids that can potentially cause accelerated aging in electrical pipelines, disruption of GPS, things like that." "So what we're looking at trying to understand is how the coupling between those systems changes in space and in time," Miles said. The goals of the other satellites launched Wednesday range from basic science to technology development. The Polylingual Experimental Terminal, or PExT, will test equipment capable of sending and receiving data from multiple government and commercial satellites across multiple communications protocols. The goal is to streamline communications to and from a wide variety of satellites and space probes to improve efficiency and lower costs. Another satellite, known as Athena-EPIC, will continue ongoing measurements of Earth's radiation budget, the balance between solar energy coming into Earth's environment compared to the energy radiated back out into space. Using spare parts from earlier missions, Athena-EPIC will test innovative LEGO-like satellite components intended to lower costs while reducing the size of satellites. The Relativistic Atmospheric Loss, or REAL, satellite, another small cubesat, will study how electrons in the Van Allen radiation belts get knocked out of place to pose threats to satellites and other systems. Robyn Millan of Dartmouth University is the principal investigator. "The radiation belts are a region surrounding the Earth that are filled with high-energy charged particles that are traveling at near the speed of light," she said. "These are sometimes called killer electrons because these particles are a hazard for our satellites in space. They also rain down on our atmosphere where they can contribute to ozone destruction." The REAL cubesat weighs less than 10 pounds and measures just a foot long. Despite its small size, "it carries a powerful particle sensor that will for the first time make very rapid measurements of these electrons as they enter our atmosphere, and this is really critical for understanding what's scattering them." What makes REAL unique, she said, was the sensor's small size, allowing it to be carried by a cubesat, which "could enable future missions, especially those requiring constellations of satellites."
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
How NASA plans to learn more about space weather
What is space weather and how does it affect us on Earth? A new NASA mission plans to study our sun's activity and solar winds that cause phenomena like the Aurora Borealis.
Yahoo
19-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
2 new NASA satellites will track space weather to help keep us safe from solar storms
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A new mission set to blast off for low-Earth orbit will study magnetic storms around the Earth and learn more about how they affect our atmosphere and satellites. NASA's Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites, or TRACERS for short, mission represents a pair of satellites that will fly in a sun-synchronous orbit — meaning they are always over the dayside of the Earth — and pass through the polar cusps. The cusps are, in essence, two holes in Earth's magnetosphere, where the field lines dip down onto the magnetic poles. When an influx of solar wind particles slam into Earth's magnetosphere, they can overload the magnetic-field lines, causing them to snap, disconnect and then reconnect. Magnetic reconnection, as the process is called, can release energy that accelerates charged particles down the funnel-shaped cusps and into our atmosphere, where they collide with molecules and, if a solar storm is intense enough, generate auroral lights. When TRACERS launches — expected to be no earlier than late July — it will seek to learn more about the magnetic-reconnection process and how space weather affects our planet. "What we'll learn from TRACERS is critical for understanding, and eventually predicting, how energy from our sun impacts not only the Earth, but also our space- and ground-based assets, whether it be GPS or communications signals, power grids, space assets or our astronauts working in space," said Joe Westlake, Director of NASA's Heliophysics Division, in a NASA teleconference. Historically, the problem in studying magnetic reconnection has been that when a satellite flies through the region of reconnection and captures data, all it sees is a snapshot. Then, 90 minutes or so later on its next orbit, it takes another snapshot. In that elapsed time, the region may have changed, but it's impossible to tell from those snapshots why it's different. It could be because the system itself is changing, or the magnetic-reconnection coupling process between the solar wind and Earth's magnetosphere is moving about — or maybe it is switching on and off. "These are fundamental things that we need to understand," said TRACERS' principal investigator, David Miles of the University of Iowa, in the same teleconference. That's why TRACERS is important, because it is two satellites working in tandem rather than being a lone magnetic explorer. "They're going to follow each other at a very close separation," said Miles. "So, one spacecraft goes through, and within two minutes the second spacecraft comes through, and that gives us two closely spaced measurements." RELATED STORIES — Colossal eruption carves 250,000-mile-long 'canyon of fire' into the sun (video) — May 2024 solar storm cost $500 million in damages to farmers, new study reveals — 'We don't know how bad it could get': Are we ready for the worst space weather? Together, the twin spacecraft will measure the magnetic- and electric-field strengths where magnetic reconnection is taking place, as well as what the local ions and electrons trapped in the magnetosphere are doing. "What TRACERS is going to study is how the output of the sun couples to near-Earth space," said Miles. "What we're looking to understand is how the coupling between those systems changes in space and in time." TRACERS will not be alone out there, and will be able to work with other missions already in operation, such as NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMM), that studies reconnection from farther afield than TRACERS' low-Earth orbit 590 kilometers above our heads. There's also NASA's Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission, and the Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer (EZIE), which both study solar-wind interactions with our planet from low-Earth orbit. "TRACERS joins the fleet of current heliophysics missions that are actively increasing our understanding of the sun, space weather, and how to mitigate its impacts," said Westlake. The $170 million TRACERS is set to launch no earlier than the end of July on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that will be carrying several other small missions into orbit at the same time. The answers that TRACERS could provide about how magnetic reconnection works will allow scientists to better protect critical infrastructure for when solar storms hit. "It's going to help us keep our way of life safe here on Earth," said Westlake. Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
16-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Skimming the Sun, probe sheds light on space weather threats
Eruptions of plasma piling atop one another, solar wind streaming out in exquisite detail -- the closest-ever images of our Sun are a gold mine for scientists. Captured by the Parker Solar Probe during its closest approach to our star starting on December 24, 2024, the images were recently released by NASA and are expected to deepen our understanding of space weather and help guard against solar threats to Earth. - A historic achievement – "We have been waiting for this moment since the late Fifties," Nour Rawafi, project scientist for the mission at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, told AFP. Previous spacecraft have studied the Sun, but from much farther away. Parker was launched in 2018 and is named after the late physicist Eugene Parker, who in 1958 theorized the existence of the solar wind -- a constant stream of electrically charged particles that fan out through the solar system. The probe recently entered its final orbit where its closest approach takes it to just 3.8 million miles from the Sun's surface -- a milestone first achieved on Christmas Eve 2024 and repeated twice since on an 88-day cycle. To put the proximity in perspective: if the distance between Earth and the Sun measured one foot, Parker would be hovering just half an inch away. Its heat shield was engineered to withstand up to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,370 degrees Celsius) -- but to the team's delight, it has only experienced around 2,000F (1090C) so far, revealing the limits of theoretical modeling. Remarkably, the probe's instruments, just a yard (meter) behind the shield, remain at little more than room temperature. - Staring at the Sun – The spacecraft carries a single imager, the Wide-Field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR), which captured data as Parker plunged through the Sun's corona, or outer atmosphere. Stitched into a seconds-long video, the new images reveal coronal mass ejections (CMEs) -- massive bursts of charged particles that drive space weather -- in high resolution for the first time. "We had multiple CMEs piling up on top of each other, which is what makes them so special," Rawafi said. "It's really amazing to see that dynamic happening there." Such eruptions triggered the widespread auroras seen across much of the world last May, as the Sun reached the peak of its 11-year cycle. Another striking feature is how the solar wind, flowing from the left of the image, traces a structure called the heliospheric current sheet: an invisible boundary where the Sun's magnetic field flips from north to south. It extends through the solar system in the shape of a twirling skirt and is critical to study, as it governs how solar eruptions propagate and how strongly they can affect Earth. - Why it matters – Space weather can have serious consequences, such as overwhelming power grids, disrupting communications, and threatening satellites. As thousands more satellites enter orbit in the coming years, tracking them and avoiding collisions will become increasingly difficult -- especially during solar disturbances, which can cause spacecraft to drift slightly from their intended orbits. Rawafi is particularly excited about what lies ahead, as the Sun heads toward the minimum of its cycle, expected in five to six years. Historically, some of the most extreme space weather events have occurred during this declining phase -- including the infamous Halloween Solar Storms of 2003, which forced astronauts aboard the International Space Station to shelter in a more shielded area. "Capturing some of these big, huge be a dream," he said. Parker still has far more fuel than engineers initially expected and could continue operating for decades -- until its solar panels degrade to the point where they can no longer generate enough power to keep the spacecraft properly oriented. When its mission does finally end, the probe will slowly disintegrate -- becoming, in Rawafi's words, "part of the solar wind itself." ia/jgc
