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By European Space Agency
Proba-3 is such an ambitious mission that it needs more than one single spacecraft to succeed. In order for Proba-3’s Coronagraph spacecraft observe the Sun’s faint surrounding atmosphere, the disk-bearing Occulter spacecraft must block out the fiery solar disk. This means Proba-3’s Occulter ends up facing the Sun continuously, making it a valuable platform for science in its own right.
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By NASA
4 min read
Final Venus Flyby for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Queues Closest Sun Pass
On Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will complete its final Venus gravity assist maneuver, passing within 233 miles (376 km) of Venus’ surface. The flyby will adjust Parker’s trajectory into its final orbital configuration, bringing the spacecraft to within an unprecedented 3.86 million miles of the solar surface on Dec. 24, 2024. It will be the closest any human made object has been to the Sun.
Parker’s Venus flybys have become boons for new Venus science thanks to a chance discovery from its Wide-Field Imager for Parker Solar Probe, or WISPR. The instrument peers out from Parker and away from the Sun to see fine details in the solar wind. But on July 11, 2020, during Parker’s third Venus flyby, scientists turned WISPR toward Venus in hopes of tracking changes in the planet’s thick cloud cover. The images revealed a surprise: A portion of WISPR’s data, which captures visible and near infrared light, seemed to see all the way through the clouds to the Venusian surface below.
“The WISPR cameras can see through the clouds to the surface of Venus, which glows in the near-infrared because it’s so hot,” said Noam Izenberg, a space scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
Venus, sizzling at approximately 869 degrees Fahrenheit (about 465 C), was radiating through the clouds.
The WISPR images from the 2020 flyby, as well as the next flyby in 2021, revealed Venus’ surface in a new light. But they also raised puzzling questions, and scientists have devised the Nov. 6 flyby to help answer them.
Left: A series of WISPR images of the nightside of Venus from Parker Solar Probe’s fourth flyby showing near infrared emissions from the surface. In these images, lighter shades represent warmer temperatures and darker shades represent cooler. Right: A combined mosaic of radar images of Venus’ surface from NASA’s Magellan mission, where the brightness indicates radar properties from smooth (dark) to rough (light), and the colors indicate elevation from low (blue) to high (red). The Venus images correspond well with data from the Magellan spacecraft, showing dark and light patterns that line up with surface regions Magellan captured when it mapped Venus’ surface using radar from 1990 to 1994. Yet some parts of the WISPR images appear brighter than expected, hinting at extra information captured by WISPR’s data. Is WISPR picking up on chemical differences on the surface, where the ground is made of different material? Perhaps it’s seeing variations in age, where more recent lava flows added a fresh coat to the Venusian surface.
“Because it flies over a number of similar and different landforms than the previous Venus flybys, the Nov. 6 flyby will give us more context to evaluate whether WISPR can help us distinguish physical or even chemical properties of Venus’ surface,” Izenberg said.
After the Nov. 6 flyby, Parker will be on course to swoop within 3.8 million miles of the solar surface, the final objective of the historic mission first conceived over 65 years ago. No human-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker’s data will be charting as-yet uncharted territory. In this hyper-close regime, Parker will cut through plumes of plasma still connected to the Sun. It is close enough to pass inside a solar eruption, like a surfer diving under a crashing ocean wave.
“This is a major engineering accomplishment,” said Adam Szabo, project scientist for Parker Solar Probe at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The closest approach to the Sun, or perihelion, will occur on Dec. 24, 2024, during which mission control will be out of contact with the spacecraft. Parker will send a beacon tone on Dec. 27, 2024, to confirm its success and the spacecraft’s health. Parker will remain in this orbit for the remainder of its mission, completing two more perihelia at the same distance.
Parker Solar Probe is part of NASA’s Living with a Star program to explore aspects of the Sun-Earth system that directly affect life and society. The Living with a Star program is managed by the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, manages the Parker Solar Probe mission for NASA and designed, built, and operates the spacecraft.
By Miles Hatfield
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Nov 04, 2024 Related Terms
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Parker Solar Probe
On a mission to “touch the Sun,” NASA’s Parker Solar Probe became the first spacecraft to fly through the corona…
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By NASA
5 min read
30 Years On, NASA’s Wind Is a Windfall for Studying our Neighborhood in Space
An artist’s concept of NASA’s Wind spacecraft outside of Earth’s magnetosphere. NASA Picture it: 1994. The first World Wide Web conference took place in Geneva, the first Chunnel train traveled under the English Channel, and just three years after the end of the Cold War, the first Russian instrument on a U.S. spacecraft launched into deep space from Cape Canaveral. The mission to study the solar wind, aptly named Wind, held promise for heliophysicists and astrophysicists around the world to investigate basic plasma processes in the solar wind barreling toward Earth —key information for helping us understand and potentially mitigate the space weather environment surrounding our home planet.
Thirty years later, Wind continues to deliver on that promise from about a million miles away at the first Earth-Sun Lagrange Point (L1). This location is gravitationally balanced between Earth and the Sun, providing excellent fuel economy that requires mere puffs of thrust to stay in place.
According to Lynn Wilson, who is the Wind project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, fuel is only one indicator of Wind’s life expectancy, however. “Based on fuel alone, Wind can continue flying until 2074,” he said. “On the other hand, its ability to return data hinges on the last surviving digital tape recorder onboard.”
An artist’s concept shows a closeup of the Wind spacecraft. NASA Wind launched with two digital tape recorders to record data from all the instruments on the spacecraft and provide reports on the spacecraft’s thermal conditions, orientation, and overall health. Each recorder has two tape decks, A and B, which Wilson affectionately refers to as “fancy eight-tracks.”
After six years of service, the first digital tape recorder failed in 2000 along with its two tape decks, forcing mission operators to switch to the second one. Tape Deck A on that one started showing signs of wear in 2016, so the mission operators now use Tape Deck B as the primary deck, with A as a backup.
“They built redundancy into the digital tape recorder system by building two of them, but you can never predict how technology will perform when it’s a million miles away, bathing in ionizing radiation,” said Wilson. “We’re fortunate that after 30 years, we still have two functioning tape decks.”
Wind launched on Nov. 1, 1994, on a Delta IV rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. NASA Bonus Science
When Wind launched on Nov. 1, 1994, nobody could have possibly predicted that exactly 30 years later, NASA would be kicking off “Bonus Science” month in the Heliophysics Big Year. Beyond the mission’s incredible track record of mesmerizing discoveries about the solar wind — some detailed on its 25th anniversary — Wind continues to deliver with bonus science abound.
Opportunity and Collaborative Discovery
Along its circuitous journey to L1, Wind dipped in and out of Earth’s magnetosphere more than 65 times, capturing the largest whistler wave — a low-frequency radio wave racing across Earth’s magnetic field — ever recorded in Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts. Wind also traveled ahead of and behind Earth — about 150 times our planet’s diameter in both directions, informing potential future missions that would operate in those areas with extreme exposure to the solar wind. It even took a side quest to the Moon, cruising through the lunar wake, a shadow devoid of solar wind on the far side of the Moon.
Later, from its permanent home at L1, Wind was among several corroborating spacecraft that helped confirm what scientists believe is the brightest gamma-ray burst to occur since the dawn of human civilization. The burst, GRB 221009A, was first detected by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in October 2022. Although not in its primary science objectives, Wind carries two bonus instruments designed to observe gamma-ray bursts that helped scientists confirm the burst’s origin in the Sagitta constellation.
Academic Inspiration
More than 7,200 research papers have been published using Wind data, and the mission has supported more than 100 graduate and post-graduate degrees.
Wilson was one of those degree candidates. When Wind launched, Wilson was in sixth grade, on the football, baseball, and wrestling teams, with spare time spent playing video games and reading science fiction. He had a knack for science and considered becoming a medical doctor or an engineer before committing to his love of physics, which ultimately led to his current position as Wind’s project scientist. While pursuing his doctorate, he worked with Adam Szabo who was the Wind project scientist at NASA Goddard at the time and used Wind data to study interplanetary collisionless shock waves. Szabo eventually hired Wilson to work on the Wind mission team at Goddard.
Also in sixth grade at the time, Joe Westlake, NASA Heliophysics division director,was into soccer and music, and was a voracious reader consumed with Tolkein’s stories about Middle Earth. Now he leads the NASA office that manages Wind.
“It’s amazing to think that Lynn Wilson and I were in middle school, and the original mission designers and scientists have long since retired,” said Westlake. “When a mission makes it to 30 years, you can’t help but be inspired by the role it has played not only in scientific discovery, but in the careers of multiple generations of scientists.”
By Erin Mahoney
NASA Headquarters, Washington
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Last Updated Nov 01, 2024 Related Terms
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By NASA
The Rocky Mountains in Colorado, as seen from the International Space Station. Snowmelt from the mountainous western United States is an essential natural resource, making up as much as 75% of some states’ annual freshwater supply. Summer heat has significant effects in the mountainous regions of the western United States. Melted snow washes from snowy peaks into the rivers, reservoirs, and streams that supply millions of Americans with freshwater—as much as 75% of the annual freshwater supply for some states.
But as climate change brings winter temperatures to new highs, these summer rushes of freshwater can sometimes slow to a trickle.
“The runoff supports cities most people wouldn’t expect,” explained Chris Derksen, a glaciologist and Research Scientist with Environment and Climate Change Canada. “Big cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles get water from snowmelt.”
To forecast snowmelt with greater accuracy, NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO) and a team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, are developing SNOWWI, a dual-frequency synthetic aperture radar that could one day be the cornerstone of future missions dedicated to measuring snow mass on a global scale – something the science community lacks.
SNOWWI aims to fill this technology gap. In January and March 2024, the SNOWWI research team passed a key milestone, flying their prototype for the first time aboard a small, twin-engine aircraft in Grand Mesa, Colorado, and gathering useful data on the area’s winter snowfields.
“I’d say the big development is that we’ve gone from pieces of hardware in a lab to something that makes meaningful data,” explained Paul Siqueira, professor of engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and principal investigator for SNOWWI.
SNOWWI stands for Snow Water-equivalent Wide Swath Interferometer and Scatterometer. The instrument probes snowpack with two Ku-band radar signals: a high-frequency signal that interacts with individual snow grains, and a low-frequency signal that passes through the snowpack to the ground.
The high-frequency signal gives researchers a clear look at the consistency of the snowpack, while the low-frequency signal helps researchers determine its total depth.
“Having two frequencies allows us to better separate the influence of the snow microstructure from the influence of the snow depth,” said Derksen, who participated in the Grand Mesa field campaign. “One frequency is good, two frequencies are better.”
The SNOWWI team in Grand Mesa, preparing to flight test their instrument. From an altitude of 4 kilometers (2.5 miles), SNOWWI can map 100 square kilometers (about 38 square miles) in just 30 minutes.
As both of those scattered signals interact with the snowpack and bounce back towards the instrument, they lose energy. SNOWWI measures that lost energy, and researchers later correlate those losses to features within the snowpack, especially its depth, density, and mass.
From an airborne platform with an altitude of 2.5 miles (4 kilometers), SNOWWI could map 40 square miles (100 square kilometers) of snowy terrain in just 30 minutes. From space, SNOWWI’s coverage would be even greater. Siqueira is working with Capella Space to develop a space-ready SNOWWI for satellite missions.
But there’s still much work to be done before SNOWWI visits space. Siqueira plans to lead another field campaign, this time in the mountains of Idaho. Grand Mesa is relatively flat, and Siqueira wants to see how well SNOWWI can measure snowpack tucked in the folds of complex, asymmetrical terrain.
For Derksen, who spends much of his time quantifying the freshwater content of snowpack in Canada, having a reliable database of global snowpack measurements would be game-changing.
“Snowmelt is money. It has intrinsic economic value,” he said. “If you want your salmon to run in mountain streams in the spring, you must have snowmelt. But unlike other natural resources, at this time, we really can’t monitor it very well.”
For information about opportunities to collaborate with NASA on novel, Earth-observing instruments, see ESTO’s catalog of open solicitations with its Instrument Incubator Program here.
Project Leads: Dr. Paul Siqueira, University of Massachusetts (Principal Investigator); Hans-Peter Marshall, University of Idaho (Co-Investigator)
Sponsoring Organizations: NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO), Instrument Incubator Program (IIP)
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Last Updated Oct 29, 2024 Related Terms
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By NASA
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NASA, NOAA: Sun Reaches Maximum Phase in 11-Year Solar Cycle
In a teleconference with reporters on Tuesday, representatives from NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the international Solar Cycle Prediction Panel announced that the Sun has reached its solar maximum period, which could continue for the next year.
The solar cycle is a natural cycle the Sun goes through as it transitions between low and high magnetic activity. Roughly every 11 years, at the height of the solar cycle, the Sun’s magnetic poles flip — on Earth, that’d be like the North and South poles swapping places every decade — and the Sun transitions from being calm to an active and stormy state.
Visible light images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory highlight the appearance of the Sun at solar minimum (left, Dec. 2019) versus solar maximum (right, May 2024). During solar minimum, the Sun is often spotless. Sunspots are associated with solar activity and are used to track solar cycle progress. For these images and more relating to solar maximum, visit https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14683.
NASA/SDO Images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory highlight the appearance of the Sun at solar minimum (left, December 2019) versus solar maximum (right, May 2024). These images are in the 171-angstrom wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light, which reveals the active regions on the Sun that are more common during solar maximum. For these images and more relating to solar maximum, visit https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14683.
NASA/SDO
NASA and NOAA track sunspots to determine and predict the progress of the solar cycle — and ultimately, solar activity. Sunspots are cooler regions on the Sun caused by a concentration of magnetic field lines. Sunspots are the visible component of active regions, areas of intense and complex magnetic fields on the Sun that are the source of solar eruptions.
“During solar maximum, the number of sunspots, and therefore, the amount of solar activity, increases,” said Jamie Favors, director, Space Weather Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This increase in activity provides an exciting opportunity to learn about our closest star — but also causes real effects at Earth and throughout our solar system.”
The solar cycle is the natural cycle of the Sun as it transitions between low and high activity. During the most active part of the cycle, known as solar maximum, the Sun can unleash immense explosions of light, energy, and solar radiation — all of which create conditions known as space weather. Space weather can affect satellites and astronauts in space, as well as communications systems — such as radio and GPS — and power grids on Earth.
Credits: Beth Anthony/NASA Solar activity strongly influences conditions in space known as space weather. This can affect satellites and astronauts in space, as well as communications and navigation systems — such as radio and GPS — and power grids on Earth. When the Sun is most active, space weather events become more frequent. Solar activity has led to increased aurora visibility and impacts on satellites and infrastructure in recent months.
During May 2024, a barrage of large solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) launched clouds of charged particles and magnetic fields toward Earth, creating the strongest geomagnetic storm at Earth in two decades — and possibly among the strongest displays of auroras on record in the past 500 years.
May 3–May 9, 2024, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory observed 82 notable solar flares. The flares came mainly from two active regions on the Sun called AR 13663 and AR 13664. This video highlights all flares classified at M5 or higher with nine categorized as X-class solar flares.
Credit: NASA “This announcement doesn’t mean that this is the peak of solar activity we’ll see this solar cycle,” said Elsayed Talaat, director of space weather operations at NOAA. “While the Sun has reached the solar maximum period, the month that solar activity peaks on the Sun will not be identified for months or years.”
Scientists will not be able to determine the exact peak of this solar maximum period for many months because it’s only identifiable after they’ve tracked a consistent decline in solar activity after that peak. However, scientists have identified that the last two years on the Sun have been part of this active phase of the solar cycle, due to the consistently high number of sunspots during this period. Scientists anticipate that the maximum phase will last another year or so before the Sun enters the declining phase, which leads back to solar minimum. Since 1989, the Solar Cycle Prediction Panel — an international panel of experts sponsored by NASA and NOAA — has worked together to make their prediction for the next solar cycle.
Solar cycles have been tracked by astronomers since Galileo first observed sunspots in the 1600s. Each solar cycle is different — some cycles peak for larger and shorter amounts of time, and others have smaller peaks that last longer.
Sunspot number over the previous 24 solar cycles. Scientists use sunspots to track solar cycle progress; the dark spots are associated with solar activity, often as the origins for giant explosions — such as solar flares or coronal mass ejections — which can spew light, energy, and solar material out into space. For these images and more relating to solar maximum, visit https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14683.
NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center “Solar Cycle 25 sunspot activity has slightly exceeded expectations,” said Lisa Upton, co-chair of the Solar Cycle Prediction Panel and lead scientist at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. “However, despite seeing a few large storms, they aren’t larger than what we might expect during the maximum phase of the cycle.”
The most powerful flare of the solar cycle so far was an X9.0 on Oct. 3 (X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength).
NOAA anticipates additional solar and geomagnetic storms during the current solar maximum period, leading to opportunities to spot auroras over the next several months, as well as potential technology impacts. Additionally, though less frequent, scientists often see fairly significant storms during the declining phase of the solar cycle.
The Solar Cycle 25 forecast, as produced by the Solar Cycle 25 Prediction Panel. Sunspot number is an indicator of solar cycle strength — the higher the sunspot number, the stronger the cycle. For these images and more relating to solar maximum, visit https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14683.
NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center NASA and NOAA are preparing for the future of space weather research and prediction. In December 2024, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission will make its closest-ever approach to the Sun, beating its own record of closest human-made object to the Sun. This will be the first of three planned approaches for Parker at this distance, helping researchers to understand space weather right at the source.
NASA is launching several missions over the next year that will help us better understand space weather and its impacts across the solar system.
Space weather predictions are critical for supporting the spacecraft and astronauts of NASA’s Artemis campaign. Surveying this space environment is a vital part of understanding and mitigating astronaut exposure to space radiation.
NASA works as a research arm of the nation’s space weather effort. To see how space weather can affect Earth, please visit NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center, the U.S. government’s official source for space weather forecasts, watches, warnings, and alerts.
By Abbey Interrante
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Media Contact:
Sarah Frazier, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
sarah.frazier@nasa.gov
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Abbey Interrante
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Last Updated Oct 15, 2024 Related Terms
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