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Solar Activity Update (March 16, 2025) | Sunspots, Solar Flares & Aurora Forecast 🌞
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By NASA
The innovative team of engineers and scientists from NASA, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, and more than 40 other partner organizations across the country that created the Parker Solar Probe mission has been awarded the 2024 Robert J. Collier Trophy by the National Aeronautic Association (NAA). This annual award recognizes the most exceptional achievement in aeronautics and astronautics in America with respect to improving the performance, efficiency, and safety of air or space vehicles in the previous year. Â Â
“Congratulations to the entire Parker Solar Probe team for this well-earned recognition,” said NASA acting Administrator Janet Petro. “This mission’s trailblazing research is rewriting the textbooks on solar science by going to a place no human-made object has ever been and advancing NASA’s efforts to better understand our solar system and the Sun’s influence, with lasting benefits for us all. As the first to touch the Sun and fastest human-made object ever built, Parker Solar Probe is a testament to human ingenuity and discovery.”
An artist’s concept of NASA’s Parker Solar Probe. NASA On Dec. 24, 2024, Parker Solar Probe made its closest approach to the Sun, passing deep within the Sun’s corona, just 3.8 million miles above the Sun’s surface and at a top speed of close to 430,000 mph, ushering in a new era of scientific discovery and space exploration.
“This award is a recognition of the unrelenting dedication and hard work of the Parker Solar Probe team. I am so proud of this team and honored to have been a part of it,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters in Washington. “By studying the Sun closer than ever before, we continue to advance our understanding of not only our closest star, but also stars across our universe. Parker Solar Probe’s historic close approaches to the Sun are a testament to the incredible engineering that made this record-breaking journey possible.”
Three novel aerospace technology advancements were critical to enabling this record performance: The first is the Thermal Protection System, or heat shield, that protects the spacecraft and is built to withstand brutal temperatures as high as 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. The Thermal Protection System allows Parker’s electronics and instruments to operate close to room temperature.
Additional Parker innovations included first-of-their-kind actively cooled solar arrays that protect themselves from overexposure to intense solar energy while powering the spacecraft, and a fully autonomous spacecraft system that can manage its own flight behavior, orientation, and configuration for months at a time. Parker has relied upon all of these vital technologies every day since its launch almost seven years ago, in August 2018.
“I am thrilled for the Parker Solar Probe team on receiving this well-deserved award,” said Joe Westlake, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters. “The new information about the Sun made available through this mission will improve our ability to prepare for space weather events across the solar system, as well as better understand the very star that makes life possible for us on Earth.”
Parker’s close-up observations of solar events, such as coronal mass ejections and solar particle events, are critical to advancing our understanding of the science of our Sun and the phenomena that drive high-energy space weather events that pose risks to satellites, air travel, astronauts, and even power grids on Earth. Understanding the fundamental physics behind events which drive space weather will enable more reliable predictions and lower astronaut exposure to hazardous radiation during future deep space missions to the Moon and Mars.
“This amazing team brought to life an incredibly difficult space science mission that had been studied, and determined to be impossible, for more than 60 years. They did so by solving numerous long-standing technology challenges and dramatically advancing our nation’s spaceflight capabilities,” said APL Director Ralph Semmel. “The Collier Trophy is well-earned recognition for this phenomenal group of innovators from NASA, APL, and our industry and research partners from across the nation.”
First awarded in 1911, the Robert J. Collier Trophy winner is selected by a group of aviation leaders chosen by the NAA. The Collier Trophy is housed in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
“Traveling three times closer to the Sun and seven times faster than any spacecraft before, Parker’s technology innovations enabled humanity to reach inside the Sun’s atmosphere for the first time,” said Bobby Braun, head of APL’s Space Exploration Sector. “We are all immensely proud that the Parker Solar Probe team will join a long legacy of prestigious aerospace endeavors that redefined technology and changed history.”
“The Parker Solar Probe team’s achievement in earning the 2024 Collier is a shining example of determination, genius, and teamwork,” said NAA President and CEO Amy Spowart. “It’s a distinct honor for the NAA to acknowledge and celebrate the remarkable team that turned the impossible into reality.”
Parker Solar Probe was developed as 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 Applied Physics Laboratory designed, built, and operates the spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA.
By Geoff Brown
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
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Last Updated Mar 25, 2025 Editor Sarah Frazier Contact Abbey Interrante abbey.a.interrante@nasa.gov Location Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Heliophysics Goddard Space Flight Center Heliophysics Division Parker Solar Probe (PSP) The Sun Explore More
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4 min read
NASA to Launch Three Rockets from Alaska in Single Aurora Experiment
Three NASA-funded rockets are set to launch from Poker Flat Research Range in Fairbanks, Alaska, in an experiment that seeks to reveal how auroral substorms affect the behavior and composition of Earth’s far upper atmosphere.Â
The experiment’s outcome could upend a long-held theory about the aurora’s interaction with the thermosphere. It may also improve space weather forecasting, critical as the world becomes increasingly reliant on satellite-based devices such as GPS units in everyday life.
Colorful ribbons of aurora sway with geomagnetic activity above the launch pads of Poker Flat Research Range. NASA/Rachel Lense The University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) Geophysical Institute owns Poker Flat, located 20 miles north of Fairbanks, and operates it under a contract with NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, which is part of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The experiment, titled Auroral Waves Excited by Substorm Onset Magnetic Events, or AWESOME, features one four-stage rocket and two two-stage rockets all launching in an approximately three-hour period.
Colorful vapor tracers from the largest of the three rockets should be visible across much of northern Alaska. The launch window is March 24 through April 6.
The mission, led by Mark Conde, a space physics professor at UAF, involves about a dozen UAF graduate student researchers at several ground monitoring sites in Alaska at Utqiagvik, Kaktovik, Toolik Lake, Eagle, and Venetie, as well as Poker Flat. Â NASA delivers, assembles, tests, and launches the rockets.
“Our experiment asks the question, when the aurora goes berserk and dumps a bunch of heat in the atmosphere, how much of that heat is spent transporting the air upward in a continuous convective plume and how much of that heat results in not only vertical but also horizontal oscillations in the atmosphere?” Conde said.
Confirming which process is dominant will reveal the breadth of the mixing and the related changes in the thin air’s characteristics.
“Change in composition of the atmosphere has consequences,” Conde said. “And we need to know the extent of those consequences.”
Most of the thermosphere, which reaches from about 50 to 350 miles above the surface, is what scientists call “convectively stable.” That means minimal vertical motion of air, because the warmer air is already at the top, due to absorption of solar radiation.
A technician with NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility sounding rocket office works on one of the payload sections of the rocket that will launch for the AWESOME campaign. NASA/Lee Wingfield When auroral substorms inject energy and momentum into the middle and lower thermosphere (roughly 60 to 125 miles up), it upsets that stability. That leads to one prevailing theory — that the substorms’ heat is what causes the vertical-motion churn of the thermosphere.
Conde believes instead that acoustic-buoyancy waves are the dominant mixing force and that vertical convection has a much lesser role. Because acoustic-buoyancy waves travel vertically and horizontally from where the aurora hits, the aurora-caused atmospheric changes could be occurring over a much broader area than currently believed.
Better prediction of impacts from those changes is the AWESOME mission’s practical goal.
“I believe our experiment will lead to a simpler and more accurate method of space weather prediction,” Conde said.
Two two-stage, 42-foot Terrier-Improved Malemute rockets are planned to respectively launch about 15 minutes and an hour after an auroral substorm begins. A four-stage, 70-foot Black Brant XII rocket is planned to launch about five minutes after the second rocket.Â
The first two rockets will release tracers at altitudes of 50 and 110 miles to detect wind movement and wave oscillations. The third rocket will release tracers at five altitudes from 68 to 155 miles.
Pink, blue, and white vapor traces should be visible from the third rocket for 10 to 20 minutes. Launches must occur in the dawn hours, with sunlight hitting the upper altitudes to activate the vapor tracers from the first rocket but darkness at the surface so ground cameras can photograph the tracers’ response to air movement.
By Rod Boyce
University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical InstituteÂ
NASA Media Contact: Sarah FrazierÂ
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Last Updated Mar 21, 2025 Related Terms
Sounding Rockets Goddard Space Flight Center Heliophysics Heliophysics Division Heliophysics Research Program Science & Research Science Mission Directorate Sounding Rockets Program Uncategorized Wallops Flight Facility Explore More
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