(TNND) — NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have launched three new missions to enhance our understanding of solar wind and space weather.
Three spacecraft were sent up Wednesday on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket before deploying and beginning a several-month journey to a point a million miles from Earth.
The distant destination is a Lagrange point. In this case, it’s the point where the gravity of the sun and the gravity of Earth are balanced.
“And because it’s a kind of gravitational balance point, an equilibrium point, that line between the sun and the earth rotates together,” said David Alexander, the director of the Rice Space Institute. “And so, it’s always on the sun-Earth line.”
The spacecraft will sit upstream of the solar wind and let us study it before it gets to our planet.
The spacecraft – the IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe), Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, and NOAA’s SWFO-L1 (Space Weather Follow On-Lagrange 1) – might be embarking on an astonishingly long trip through space, but they’ll remain much closer to Earth than to the sun.
The sun is about 93 million miles from Earth.
“We are embedded in the sun’s atmosphere, and the sun is a very energetic beast,” Alexander said.
We need to understand how we’re impacted by the star we orbit, he said.
“It continuously sends out a stream of energetic particles, mostly protons and electrons, and that’s called the solar wind,” Alexander said. “And that wind pervades the whole of what we call the heliosphere, the whole solar system if you want. And then the Earth is like a rock in that river. And so, there’s an interaction between that wind and the earth. And what we’re lucky to have on the Earth is a magnetic field. And that protects us from that radiation.”
Mars, for example, doesn’t have a large-scale magnetic field. It also has a very weak atmosphere.
Alexander said the thinking is that over the history of the solar system, the solar wind has stripped Mars of its atmosphere.
“That radiation environment, we’re protected from it, even in low-Earth orbit, to some extent, by the magnetic field. We’re protected by it on the ground. But we’re not protected from it when we’re in space, interplanetary space, and we’re not protected on the moon, and we’re not protected on Mars,” he said.
The energy for space weather originates from the sun, but the interaction of solar activity with Earth’s magnetic field is responsible for how the space weather affects us, Alexander said.
We have a lot of resources in space, such as satellites and the space station.
“And they’re all in this environment, where that interaction between the solar wind and the earth’s magnetic field can create a number of energetic events, geomagnetic storms we call them, and those can influence or impact satellites, they can impact astronauts on space walks, et cetera,” Alexander said.
Scientists are trying to learn more via the newly deployed spacecraft about how solar wind is created, how it accelerates and evolves, and more about its characteristics as it’s about to hit Earth.
Solar wind is always there, but our planet also has to deal with stronger, transient space weather such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections.
“The aurora is kind of a nice response to that, you know, the northern and southern lights,” Alexander said.
“Sometimes these storms are strong enough that they kind of compress the earth’s magnetic field so much that you can see the aurora as far south here as Houston,” he continued.
Alexander said space weather can have noticeable and potentially costly impacts on Earth, which are a growing concern as humans grow more reliant on the technology we launch into orbit, such as communication satellites.
“A bit like a hurricane warning, you can board up your windows, et cetera, the electronic version of that is what we’re aiming for,” Alexander said. “We’re trying to be able to predict these events.”