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By NASA
5 min read
NASA to Launch Innovative Solar Coronagraph to Space Station
NASA’s Coronal Diagnostic Experiment (CODEX) is ready to launch to the International Space Station to reveal new details about the solar wind including its origin and its evolution.
Launching in November 2024 aboard SpaceX’s 31st commercial resupply services mission, CODEX will be robotically installed on the exterior of the space station. As a solar coronagraph, CODEX will block out the bright light from the Sun’s surface to better see details in the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona.
In this animation, the CODEX instrument can be seen mounted on the exterior of the International Space Station. For more CODEX imagery, visit https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14647. CODEX Team/NASA “The CODEX instrument is a new generation solar coronagraph,” said Jeffrey Newmark, principal investigator for the instrument and scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It has a dual use — it’s both a technology demonstration and will conduct science.”
This coronagraph is different from prior coronagraphs that NASA has used because it has special filters that can provide details of the temperature and speed of the solar wind. Typically, a solar coronagraph captures images of the density of the plasma flowing away from the Sun. By combining the temperature and speed of the solar wind with the traditional density measurement, CODEX can give scientists a fuller picture of the wind itself.
“This isn’t just a snapshot,” said Nicholeen Viall, co-investigator of CODEX and heliophysicist at NASA Goddard. “You’re going to get to see the evolution of structures in the solar wind, from when they form from the Sun’s corona until they flow outwards and become the solar wind.”
The CODEX instrument will give scientists more information to understand what heats the solar wind to around 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit — around 175 times hotter than the Sun’s surface — and sends it streaming out from the Sun at almost a million miles per hour.
Team members for CODEX pose with the instrument in a clean facility during initial integration of the coronagraph with the pointing system. CODEX Team/NASA This launch is just the latest step in a long history for the instrument. In the early 2000s and in August 2017, NASA scientists ran ground-based experiments similar to CODEX during total solar eclipses. A coronagraph mimics what happens during a total solar eclipse, so this naturally occurring phenomena provided a good opportunity to test instruments that measure the temperature and speed of the solar wind.
In 2019, NASA scientists launched the Balloon-borne Investigation of Temperature and Speed of Electrons in the corona (BITSE) experiment. A balloon the size of a football field carried the CODEX prototype 22 miles above Earth’s surface, where the atmosphere is much thinner and the sky is dimmer than it is from the ground, enabling better observations. However, this region of Earth’s atmosphere is still brighter than outer space itself.
“We saw enough from BITSE to see that the technique worked, but not enough to achieve the long-term science objectives,” said Newmark.
Now, by installing CODEX on the space station, scientists will be able to view the Sun’s corona without fighting the brightness of Earth’s atmosphere. This is also a beneficial time for the instrument to launch because the Sun has reached its solar maximum phase, a period of high activity during its 11-year cycle.
“The types of solar wind that we get during solar maximum are different than some of the types of wind we get during solar minimum,” said Viall. “There are different coronal structures during this time that lead to different types of solar wind.”
The CODEX coronagraph is shown during optical alignment and assembly. CODEX Team//NASA This coronagraph will be looking at two types of solar wind. In one, the solar wind travels directly outward from our star, pulling the magnetic field from the Sun into the heliosphere, the bubble that surrounds our solar system. The other type of solar wind forms from magnetic field lines that are initially closed, like a loop, but then open up.
These closed field lines contain hot, dense plasma. When the loops open, this hot plasma gets propelled into the solar wind. While these “blobs” of plasma are present throughout all of the solar cycle, scientists expect their location to change because of the magnetic complexity of the corona during solar maximum. The CODEX instrument is designed to see how hot these blobs are for the first time.
The coronagraph will also build upon research from ongoing space missions, such as the joint ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA mission Solar Orbiter, which also carries a coronagraph, and NASA’s Parker Solar Probe. For example, CODEX will look at the solar wind much closer to the solar surface, while Parker Solar Probe samples it a little farther out. Launching in 2025, NASA’s Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission will make 3D observations of the Sun’s corona to learn how the mass and energy there become solar wind.
By comparing these findings, scientists can better understand how the solar wind is formed and how the solar wind changes as it travels farther from the Sun. This research advances our understanding of space weather, the conditions in space that may interact with Earth and spacecraft.
“Just like understanding hurricanes, you want to understand the atmosphere the storm is flowing through,” said Newmark. “CODEX’s observations will contribute to our understanding of the region that space weather travels through, helping improve predictions.”
The CODEX instrument is a collaboration between NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute with additional contribution from Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics.
By Abbey Interrante
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Oct 30, 2024 Related Terms
Coronal Diagnostic Experiment (CODEX) Goddard Space Flight Center Heliophysics Heliophysics Division International Space Station (ISS) Science Mission Directorate Solar Wind Space Weather The Sun The Sun & Solar Physics Explore More
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By NASA
The Progress Pride flag is seen flying at the Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters Building, June 9, 2022, in Washington.Credits: NASA/Joel Kowsky NASA is announcing the relaunch of the NASA Acquisition Innovation Launchpad (NAIL), a framework to drive innovation and modernize acquisition processes across the agency, after piloting the program for a year.
NASA spends approximately $21 billion or 85% of its budget on acquiring goods and services. Managed by NASA’s Office of Procurement, the NAIL was established to identify ways to manage risk-taking and encourage innovation through the submission, review, and approval of ideas from anyone who engages in the acquisition process.
Since launching last year, the goal of the NAIL has been to build an innovation-focused culture that can produce ideas from team members in the Office of Procurement or across the agency, as well as from industry.
“The success of the NAIL inaugural year has laid a strong foundation for the future,” said Karla Smith Jackson, deputy chief acquisition officer and assistant administrator for the Office of Procurement.
Over the past year, the NAIL has achieved numerous milestones, allowing NASA to approach various procurement challenges and implement diverse solutions. Key accomplishments include improving procurement processes and technological automations and developing an industry feedback forum. The program update will leverage industry’s feedback to continue fostering innovative solutions and optimize the agency’s procurement efforts.
As NASA’s Office of Procurement embarks on fiscal year 2025, the NAIL relaunch will use information from the program’s pilot year to focus on the following priorities:
Providing additional engagement opportunities for the agency’s network of innovators Enhancing the framework to improve internal outcomes for the agency Promoting procurement success stories Investing in talent and technology “We are incredibly proud of the program’s achievements and are even more excited about the opportunities ahead with the relaunch,” said Kameke Mitchell, NAIL chair and director for the Procurement Strategic Operations Division. “We encourage everyone to get involved and make fiscal year 2025 a standout year for innovation.”
In addition to programmatic updates, NAIL’s program manager, Brittney Chappell, will lead new engagements and framework enhancements moving forward.
“I am thrilled to step into this role and lead the program, using everything our team has learned from the last year,” said Chappell. “Together with internal and external stakeholders, we will turn bold ideas into impactful solutions that drive real change.”
To collaborate or share innovative ideas, reach out to the NAIL Procurement team at hq-op-nail@mail.nasa.gov.
For more information about the NAIL framework, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/procurement-nail-framework
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Last Updated Oct 16, 2024 LocationNASA Headquarters Related Terms
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By NASA
Illustration of logistics elements on the lunar surface. NASA NASA is asking U.S. industry to submit innovative architecture solutions that could help the agency land and move cargo on the lunar surfaced during future Artemis missions. Released in September, the agency’s request for proposal also supports NASA’s broader Moon to Mars Objectives.
Previously, NASA published two white papers outlining lunar logistics and mobility gaps as part of its Moon to Mars architecture development effort that augmented an earlier white paper on logistics considerations. The current ask, Lunar Logistics and Mobility Studies, expects proposing companies to consider these publications, which describe NASA’s future needs for logistics and mobility.
“NASA relies on collaborations from diverse partners to develop its exploration architecture,” said Nujoud Merancy, deputy associate administrator, strategy and architecture in the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Studies like this allow the agency to leverage the incredible expertise in the commercial aerospace community.”
Lunar Logistics Drivers, Needs
Logistics items, including food, water, air, and spare parts, comprise a relatively large portion of the cargo NASA expects to need to move around on the Moon, including at the lunar South Pole where the agency plans to send crew in the future.
The Lunar Logistics Drivers and Needs white paper outlines the importance of accurately predicting logistics resupply needs, as they can heavily influence the overall architecture and design of exploration missions.
As the agency progresses into more complex lunar missions, NASA will require more and more lunar logistics as the agency increases mission frequency and duration. This current proposal seeks industry studies that could help inform NASA’s approach to this growing need.
Lunar Mobility Drivers, Needs
The white paper discusses the transportation of landed cargo and exploration assets from where they are delivered to where they are used, such as to locations with ideal lighting, away from ascent vehicle landing sites, or near other assets. These distances can range from yards to miles away from landing locations, and the ability to move around landing sites easily and quickly are key to exploring the lunar surface efficiently.
NASA’s current planned lunar mobility elements, such as the Lunar Terrain Vehicle and Pressurized Rover, have a capability limit of about 1,760 pounds (800 kilograms) and will primarily be used to transport astronauts around the lunar surface. However, future missions could include a need to move cargo totaling around 4,400 to 13,000 pounds (2,000 to 6,000 kg). To meet this demand, NASA must develop new mobility capabilities with its partners.
Lunar Surface Cargo
The Lunar Surface Cargo white paper characterizes lunar surface cargo delivery needs, compares those needs with current cargo lander capabilities, and outlines considerations for fulfilling this capability gap. While cargo delivery capabilities currently included in the Moon to Mars architecture — like CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) and human-class delivery landers — can meet near-term needs, there are substantial gaps for future needs.
Access to a diverse fleet of cargo landers would empower a larger lunar exploration footprint. A combination of international partnerships and U.S. industry-provided landers could supply the concepts and capabilities to meet this need. The request for proposals doesn’t explicitly seek new lander concepts but does ask for integrated assessments of logistics that can include transportation elements.
“We’re looking for industry to offer creative insights that can inform our logistics and mobility strategy,” said Brooke Thornton, industry engagement lead for NASA’s Strategy and Architecture Office. “Ultimately, we’re hoping to grow our awareness of the unique capabilities that are or could become a part of the commercial lunar marketplace.”
This is the latest appendix to NASA’s Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP-2). Solicitations under NextSTEP seek commercial development of capabilities that empower crewed exploration in deep space. NASA published the latest NextSTEP omnibus, NextSTEP-3, on Sept. 27.
Request for Proposals
https://sam.gov/opp/2291c465203240388302bb1f126c3db9/view
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By NASA
Figure 1. An artist’s concept of the Van Allen belts with a cutaway section of the giant donuts of radiation that surround Earth. Image Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Scientific Visualization Studio A new instrument is using advanced detection techniques and leveraging an orbit with specific characteristics to increase our understanding of the Van Allen belts—regions surrounding Earth that contain energetic particles that can endanger both robotic and human space missions. Recently, the instrument provided a unique view of changes to this region that were brought on by an intense magnetic storm in May 2024.
The discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts by the U.S. Explorer 1 mission in 1958 marked a prominent milestone in space physics and demonstrated that Earth’s magnetosphere efficiently accelerates and traps energetic particles. The inner belt contains protons in the MeV (million electric volt) to GeV (109 electric volt) range, and even higher concentrations of energetic electrons of 100s of keV (1000 electric volt) to MeV are found in both the inner belt and the outer belt.
The energetic electrons in these belts—also referred to as “killer electrons”—can have detrimental effects on spacecraft subsystems and are harmful to astronauts performing extravehicular activities. Understanding the source, loss, and varying concentrations of these electrons has been a longstanding research objective. High-energy resolution and clean measurements of these energetic electrons in space are required to further our understanding of their properties and enable more reliable prediction of their intensity.
Overcoming the challenges of measuring relativistic electrons in the inner belt
Measuring energetic electrons cleanly and accurately has been a challenge, especially in the inner belt, where MeV to GeV energy protons also exist. NASA’s Van Allen Probes, which operated from 2012 to 2019 in low inclination, geo-transfer-like orbits, showed that instruments traversing the heart of the inner radiation belt are subject to penetration by the highly energetic protons located in that region. The Relativistic Electron Proton Telescope (REPT) and the Magnetic Electron and Ion Spectrometer (MagEIS) instruments onboard the Van Allen Probes were heavily shielded but were still subject to inner-belt proton contamination.
To attempt to minimize these negative effects, a University of Colorado Boulder team led by Dr. Xinlin Li, designed the Relativistic Electron Proton Telescope integrated little experiment (REPTile)—a simplified and miniaturized version of REPT—to fly onboard the Colorado Student Space Weather Experiment (CSSWE). An effort supported by the National Science Foundation, the 3-Unit CSSWE CubeSat operated in a highly inclined low Earth orbit (LEO) from 2012 to 2014. In this highly inclined orbit, the spacecraft and the instruments it carried were only exposed to the inner-belt protons in the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) region where the Earth’s magnetic field is weaker, which greatly reduced the time that protons impacted the measurement of electrons.
REPTile’s success motivated a team, also led by Dr. Xinlin Li, to design REPTile-2—an advanced version of REPTile—to be hosted on the Colorado Inner Radiation Belt Experiment (CIRBE) mission. Like CSSWE, CIRBE operates in a highly inclined low-Earth orbit to ensure the exposure to damaging inner-belt protons is minimized. The team based the REPTile-2 design on REPTile but incorporated two additional technologies—guard rings and Pulse Height Analysis—to enable clean, high-energy-resolution measurements of energetic electrons, especially in the inner belt.
Figure 2: PI observing two engineers testing the interface between the CIRBE bus and REPTile-2 on September 29, 2021. Image Credit: Xinlin Li, University of Colorado Boulder As shown on the left in Figure 3, the field of view (FOV) of REPTile-2 is 51o. Electrons and protons enter the FOV and are measured when they reach a stack of silicon detectors where they deposit their energies. However, very energetic protons (energy greater than 60 MeV) could penetrate through the instrument’s tungsten and aluminum shielding and masquerade as valid particles, thus contaminating the intended measurements. To mitigate this contamination, the team designed guard rings that surround each detector. These guard rings are electronically separated from the inner active area of each detector and are connected by a separate electric channel. When the guard rings are triggered (i.e., hit by particles coming outside of the FOV), the coincident measurements are considered invalid and are discarded. This anti-coincidence technique enables cleaner measurements of particles coming through the FOV.
Figure 3. Left (adapted from Figure 1 of Khoo et al., 2022): Illustration of REPTile-2 front end with key features labeled; Right: REPTile-2 front end integrated with electronic boards and structures, a computer-aided design (CAD) model, and a photo of integrated REPTile-2. Image Credit: Xinlin Li, University of Colorado Boulder To achieve high energy resolution, the team also applied full Pulse Height Analysis (PHA) on REPTile-2. In PHA, the magnitude of measured charge in the detector is directly proportional to the energy deposited from the incident electrons. Unlike REPTile, which employed a simpler energy threshold discrimination method yielding three channels for the electrons, REPTile-2 offers enhanced precision with 60 energy channels for electron energies ranging from 0.25 – 6 MeV. The REPT instrument onboard the Van Allen Probes also employed PHA but while REPT worked very well in the outer belt, yielding fine energy resolution, it did not function as well in the inner belt since the instrument was fully exposed to penetrating energetic protons because it did not have the guard rings implemented.
Figure 4: The CIRBE team after a successful “plugs-out” test of the CIRBE spacecraft on July 21, 2022. During this test the CIRBE spacecraft successfully received commands from ground stations and completed various performance tests, including data transmission back to ground stations at LASP. Image Credit: Xinlin Li, University of Colorado Boulder CIRBE and REPTile-2 Results
CIRBE’s launch, secured through the NASA CubeSat Launch Initiative (CSLI), took place aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket as part of the Transporter-7 mission on April 15, 2023. REPTile-2, activated on April 19, 2023, has been performing well, delivering valuable data about Earth’s radiation belt electrons. Many features of the energetic electrons in the Van Allen belts have been revealed for the first time, thanks to the high-resolution energy and time measurements REPTile-2 has provided.
Figure 5 shows a sample of CIRBE/REPTile-2 measurements from April 2024, and illustrates the intricate drift echoes or “zebra stripes” of energetic electrons, swirling around Earth in distinct bunches. These observations span a vast range across the inner and outer belts, encompassing a wide spectrum of energies and electron fluxes extending over six orders of magnitude. By leveraging advanced guard rings, Pulse Height Analysis (PHA), and a highly inclined LEO orbit, REPTile-2 is delivering unprecedented observations of radiation belt electrons.
Figure 5: Color-coded electron fluxes detrended between REPTile-2 measurements for a pass over the South Atlantic Anomaly region on April 24, 2023, and their average, i.e., the smoothed electron fluxes using a moving average window of ±19% in energy; Black curves plotted on top of the color-coded electron fluxes are contours of electron drift period in hr. The second horizontal-axis, L, represents the magnetic field line, which CIRBE crosses. The two radiation belts and a slot region in between are indicated by the red lines and arrow, respectively. Image Credit: Xinlin Li, University of Colorado Boulder In fact, the team recently announced that measurements from CIRBE/REPTile-2 have revealed a new temporary third radiation belt composed of electrons and sandwiched between the two permanent belts. This belt formed during the magnetic storm in May 2024, which was the largest in two decades. While such temporary belts have been seen after big storms previously, the data from CIRBE/REPTile-2 are providing a new viewpoint with higher energy resolution data than before. Scientists are currently studying the data to better understand the belt and how long it might stick around — which could be many months.
PROJECT LEAD
Dr. Xinlin Li, University of Colorado Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences.
SPONSORING ORGANIZATIONS
Heliophysics Flight Opportunities for Research & Technology (H-FORT) program, National Science Foundation
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Last Updated Sep 17, 2024 Related Terms
Heliophysics Heliophysics Division Science-enabling Technology Explore More
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By Space Force
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III announced seven initiatives to improve the quality of life for service members and their families.
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