NASA’s Upcoming Mission Will Study Space Weather Systems Around Earth
NASA’s newest mission aims to assist scientists in understanding and, ultimately, forecasting the different space weather system around Earth. Space weather can have broad impacts on our planet that affect technology and astronauts. Sometimes it can cause disruptions to radio communications, and when it’s most severe, it can even knock out entire power grids
For the first time, NASA’s new mission will gather global observations of an essential cause of space weather in an active area of Earth’s upper atmosphere that can result in interference with radio and GPS communications.
The Atmospheric Waves Experiment (AWE) mission comes at the price of $42 million and is set to deploy in August 2022, onboard the exterior of the Earth-orbiting International Space Station. From this perch, AWE will look at colourful bands of light in Earth’s atmosphere, known as airglow, to figure out what mix of forces motivates space weather in the upper atmosphere.
Initially, researchers believed that only the Sun’s constant outflow of ultraviolet light and particles, known as the solar wind, could affect the area. But, now experts have learned that solar variability is not enough to cause the changes that we see. What’s more, Earth’s weather must also be having an effect. Thus, to help solve this mystery, AWE will examine how waves in the lower atmosphere, due to variations in the densities of different packets of air, affect the upper atmosphere.
AWE is a Mission of Opportunity working under NASA’s Heliophysics Explorers Program, which performs focused scientific research and works on new instrumentation to help resolve the scientific gaps between NASA’s larger missions. Since NASA launched its first satellite Explorer 1, in 1958, which discovered Earth’s radiation belts, the Explorers Program has backed over 90 missions. The Uhuru and Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) missions won Nobel prizes for their work.
Paul Hertz, NASA’s Director of Astrophysics, explained that the Explorers Programlooks for innovative ideas for small missions that don’t have large budgets but can still help solve different puzzles of the universe and explore humanity’s place in it. Hertz added that the AWE mission meets that standard using a creative and cost-effective way to look for answers about Earth’s upper atmosphere.
AWE was chosen as a mission based on its potential value to science and the ease of its development plans. Michael Taylor from Utah State University in Logan is in charge of the mission, and the Explorers Program Office manages it at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Furthermore, NASA has also chosen the Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment (SunRISE) for a seven-month extensive formulation investigation that will cost $100,000. SunRISE will be an array of six CubeSats functioning similarly to one giant radio telescope. This suggested mission would examine how massive space weather storms from the Sun, known as solar particle storms, are accelerated and released into the solar system.
However, SunRISE is not yet ready for the next step of mission development, but the suggested idea represents an intriguing use of new NASA-developed technology. Justin Kasper from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor is in charge of SunRISE, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages this mission in Pasadena, California.
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