“This is a very ambitious and very exciting mission.”
Tuning In
Spectacular phenomena occur regularly on the surface of the Sun, including: Coronal mass ejection (CME) and Solar flare It astounds us with its intensity, but this solar activity also produces something more subtle that fascinates astronomers: a mysterious radio signal that has proven difficult to pinpoint, even decades after it was first observed.
Scientists know that the source of these radio bursts is somewhere in the CME, but these solar outbursts HugeThese blast billions of tonnes of material into space, which can easily dwarf planets, and stretch as they move, sometimes even swallowing a quarter of the space between the Sun and Earth.
Now NASA is trying to solve this mystery by launching a new mission called the CubeSat Radio Interferometry Experiment (CURIE), which will place two tiny satellites in orbit around Earth to measure these radio bursts individually.
“This is a very ambitious and very exciting mission,” said David Sundqvist, CURIE principal investigator and a research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. release“This is the first time we’ve sent a radio interferometer into space in a controlled way, which is a pioneering move for radio astronomy in general.”
Tag Team
The just-launched CURIE mission consists of two CubeSats, very small satellites about the size of a shoebox, which were delivered into orbit aboard the European Space Agency’s Ariane 6 rocket. on tuesday.
The plan is to deploy the satellite about 360 miles above the Earth’s surface, using two 8-foot-tall antennas to scan radio waves between 0.1 and 19 megahertz that are normally absorbed by Earth’s upper atmosphere.
Crucially, the satellites will be placed about two miles apart from each other, and by measuring the extremely small differences in the time it takes a radio signal to reach each satellite, scientists will try to calculate exactly where the signal came from.
Signal Boost
There’s good reason to be interested in the details of solar phenomena like CMEs: In addition to their massive bombardment of solar material, CMEs also emit powerful magnetic fields that could affect planets in the solar system in ways we don’t yet understand.
On Earth, magnetic fields wreak havoc in the atmosphere. Sometimes the results are beautiful — could cause severe disruptions to electronic infrastructure and communications. CMEs are difficult to predict, and their relationship to solar flares (explosions that shoot powerful radiation into space) is unclear.
CURIE is a bold experiment that is expected to mark a step forward in observing the Sun from space and pave the way for a deeper understanding of the role that solar eruptions play in our solar system.
More about the Sun: Solar storm so powerful it shuts down farm equipment across the US and Canada
