Latest news with #JoeWestlake
San Francisco Chronicle
2 days ago
- Science
- San Francisco Chronicle
Satellites launching from California could help scientists understand disruptive space weather
Two twin satellites — part of NASA's TRACERS mission — set to launch tomorrow at Vandenberg Space Force Base will help scientists better understand space weather. Researchers expect the mission to provide new insights into how charged particles from the sun plow into Earth's magnetic shield. Such interactions underlie the dazzling northern lights, like the brilliant light shows that swept large swaths of California in 2024. 'What we will learn from TRACERS is critical for the understanding and eventually the predicting of how energy from our sun impacts the Earth,' said Joe Westlake, director of NASA's heliophysics division, during a briefing July 17. 'It's going to help us keep our way of life safe here on Earth.' The explosion of energy can also wreak havoc on satellites and power grids. Data collected by the TRACERS mission could aid future aurora forecasts and also inform preparations ahead of damaging geomagnetic storms. Two identical satellites will capture data on how a steady stream of charged particles from the sun, also known as solar wind, enters the near-Earth environment. This process is known as magnetic reconnection. High solar wind speeds can bring geomagnetic storms while slow wind speeds bring calm space weather. Fast solar winds can also cause auroral displays. The most expansive displays, like those above California in 2024, are typically associated with coronal mass ejections, large expulsions of charged particles and magnetic fields from the sun. Solar winds carry the sun's embedded magnetic field, reaching speeds over one million miles per hour. Earth's magnetosphere, a region dominated by the planet's magnetic field, acts as a protective bubble deflecting the solar wind and shielding Earth from solar radiation. The twin satellites, each slightly larger than a washing machine,will fly through a narrow region in Earth's magnetic field known as a polar cusp, where solar wind funnels into Earth's atmosphere. Over a year, the spacecraft will make 3,000 passes through the northern polar cusp. The reason for two satellites, rather than just one, is to probe how magnetic reconnection occurs in space and time. The two TRACERS spacecraft will follow each other in orbit, creating closely spaced snapshots that will help scientists tease apart how quickly changes in plasma, or charged particles from the sun, occur. The two satellites carry scientific equipment provided by UC Berkeley, UCLA and other institutions. UC Berkeley's instruments sense electricity within the magnetized plasma of near-Earth space, said David Miles, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Iowa and principal investigator of the TRACERS mission, by email. UCLA's instruments work like extremely sensitive compasses and measure the strength and direction of the local magnetic field. 'These instruments from Berkeley and UCLA are crucial for decoding the complex interactions in our planet's space environment and the magnetic reconnection process that couples in energy from the solar wind,' Miles said. Decoding such interactions is important for life closer to the surface. The historic storm in May 2024 that led to aurora viewings in California impacted air travel: Transoceanic flights were rerouted due to high-frequency radio loss, Westlake said. The event also caused roughly $500 million in economic losses in the agriculture sector, due to precision GPS issues, Westlake added. 'TRACERS joins the fleet of current heliophysics missions that are actively increasing our understanding of the sun and space weather and how to mitigate these impacts,' Westlake said.
Hans India
4 days ago
- Science
- Hans India
2 new NASA satellites to track space weather for solar storms
Washington: 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." 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."
Yahoo
26-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
2 NASA missions will carpool on a SpaceX rocket this Friday to help map the cosmos
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Friday (Feb. 28) is shaping up to be a delightful day for space explorers, as not one but two major NASA missions are expected to take to the skies — and interestingly, though the spacecraft associated with these missions are pretty different from one another, you might say they all have the same profession: cosmic cartography. Cartographer one, named PUNCH, will map the sun's dynamics, while cartographer two, named SPHEREx, will kind of map the rest of the universe. "How does the universe work? How did we get here within that universe? And are we alone in that universe?" Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters, pondered while speaking with reporters on Tuesday (Feb. 25). "Those are big enough where we can't answer them with one instrument. We can't even answer them with one mission. We need a full fleet to do that, and every time we fly a new telescope, we make sure that it adds to that fleet in ways that are unique from everything we've built before." At present, launch is scheduled to take place from Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California no earlier than Friday at 10:09 p.m. EST (7:09 p.m. local time, and 0309 GMT on March 1). PUNCH's four-satellite system and SPHEREx's single conical structure will be riding atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as part of NASA's Launch Services Program, which connects space missions with appropriate commercial launch vehicles. "Heliophysics is catching a ride," Joe Westlake, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters, said during the Tuesday press conference. "[It's] going along with the SPHEREx launch, and really providing over and over again that value to the American taxpayer, having these two missions go up together." The PUNCH mission, which stands for Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere, is made of four small satellites — three wide-field imagers and a narrow-field imager — that'll be stationed around Earth. Together, they're built to create 3D views of the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, as it turns into the solar wind that fills up our cosmic neighborhood's enormous bubble, known as the heliosphere. Moreover, it'll be doing so by tapping into polarized light patterns, which basically means it can reveal the directions of different features within the heliosphere. "I think PUNCH is going to revolutionize our physical understanding of space weather events and how they propagate through the inner heliosphere on their way to the Earth," Nicholeen Viall, PUNCH mission scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told reporters during the press conference. For example, sometimes solar eruptions — blips of plasma that erupt from our star's surface — can break off and shoot into space. This is called a coronal mass ejection, or CME. And due to its polarized light capabilities, the PUNCH mission will be able to understand the direction such a CME is moving in. As Viall explained, its satellite vigilantes stationed around our planet should be able to paint a picture of whether a CME is coming toward Earth or if it's headed elsewhere within our solar system. It won't be the first spacecraft to deal with polarized light — the PUNCH team has emphasized that the STEREO spacecraft certainly have done so — but it could have the best polarized-light-related resolution. "STEREO has looked in polarized light and has looked at the whole inner solar system, but not with this kind of resolution — not even close," Viall said. "We're doing 100 times better than what STEREO did, and we're going and looking over the poles, and that requires a tremendous amount of sensitivity." Then, on the other hand, you have the SPHEREx mission, which stands for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer. Scientists like to compare SPHEREx to something you're more than likely familiar with: the James Webb Space Telescope. Here's why. Like the JWST, SPHEREx will be peering out into the infrared universe. This means it'll be working with infrared light wavelengths coming from arcane sections of the cosmos in order to illuminate what happened during the chaotic first several moments of time. However, unlike the JWST, which creates highly in-depth portraits of relatively small sections of the sky, SPHEREx is going bigger. It'll manage to capture sweeping, wide-angle images of the entire night sky. "Imagine you're a photographer that wants to capture wildlife in a forest," Domagal-Goldman said. "You may take a camera designed to zoom in on a tree, or maybe even a nest and the eggs inside a nest on a tree — that's what James Webb does. What SPHEREx does is, it's the panoramic lens. It's going to give us not that egg in a nest in a tree. It's going to give us the forest and all the trees within it." "We're going to produce 102 maps in 102 wavelengths every six months," Phil Korngut, SPHEREx instrument scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, told reporters during the Tuesday press conference. With such a goal, Domagal-Goldman says SPHEREx should be able to help answer three key questions in astronomy. The first has to do with cosmic inflation, or the extreme way our universe seemed to "inflate" just after the Big Bang provoked the beginning of time. In short, how – and why — did the universe expand a trillion trillion fold, going from the size of an atom to the expanse we see today, in fractions of a second? "If we can produce a map of what the universe looks like today and understand that structure, we can tie it back to those original moments just after the Big Bang," Korngut said. "So the largest scales imaginable on billions of light-years across are tied to the smallest scales imaginable, just a tiny fraction of an atom." The second question, meanwhile, has to do with the evolution of galaxies, and the final one surrounds the origins of water and ice in our universe. Related Stories: — SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket debris creates dramatic fireball over Europe, crashes in Poland (video) — NASA's 'SPHEREx' infrared space telescope is launching this week. Here's why it's a big deal — NASA's launching a new sun mission this month: 'PUNCH is going to see a total solar eclipse' "Where is all the water? On Earth, we know that every living creature needs water to survive, but how and when did that water get here? And how might that work for planets around other stars?" Rachel Akeson, SPHEREx science data center lead at Caltech/IPAC, said during the press conference. As I'm sure this article makes clear, both PUNCH and SPHEREx's mere existence has already started to spur endless questions among scientists — and if these space explorers manage to fulfill their destinies and lead humanity to some long-awaited answers, I hope their creators will remember the delightful day that was Feb. 28, 2025.
