Sensors from the University of New Hampshire have been shot into space to study massive eruptions from the surface of the sun.
Carrying 16 instruments each, the satellites are to help scientists predict the billion-ton eruptions of electrified gas and deadly particles known as coronal mass ejections that cause the Northern Lights and can disrupt power grids on Earth.
The sensors are aboard two spacecraft launched Wednesday in Florida to monitor and analyze highly charged particles that streak through the solar system from the sun. One spacecraft will orbit the sun ahead of Earth, and the other will orbit behind, giving scientists their first three-dimensional view of the sun.
To gather 3-D views of the Sun, the two satellites have to fly in separate orbits so they can perceive depth, like a pair of human eyes. The orbits will closely track Earth’s, but the two satellites will gradually separate, so that in four years they will be on opposite sides of the Sun.
UNH’s lead scientist for the mission, known by the acronym STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory), is Antionette Galvin.
“The NASA STEREO mission, for the first time, will routinely take ages of the extended solar atmosphere with remote imaging instruments on one STEREO spacecraft, while taking direct samples of the same solar wind parcel as it flows by the other STEREO spacecraft,” Galvin said.
The UNH instruments, and others created elsewhere, will explore the origin, evolution and consequences of what are called solar flares, which are among the most violent explosions in the solar system.
The eruptions can disrupt satellites, radio communications and power systems. They can be hazards to spacecraft and astronauts and are responsible for the northern lights, the aurora borealis.
UNH’s part of the study focuses on protons and alpha particles, which UNH says account for most of the mass in solar eruptions.
Michael Kaiser, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said scientists trying to forecast space weather are about at the level that Earth-weather forecasters were in the 1950s when their first knowledge of a hurricane often was the arrival of rain clouds.
The two satellites are about the size of golf carts. Each has three scientific investigations in addition to the one led by UNH.
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