On July 18, NASA successfully launched a sounding rocket mission from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, carrying a remarkable new technology. Its goal is to capture high-speed, high-resolution, multidimensional data from one of the Sun’s least understood regions, the chromosphere and transition region.
The chromosphere is a layer of the Sun’s atmosphere between its visible surface and the corona, or outer atmosphere. This region is where solar flares, jets and coronal mass ejections develop. Temperatures in this region rise rapidly, ranging from ~6000°C in the photosphere to over a million degrees in the corona. The instrument, the Solar EruptioN Integral Field Spectrograph (SNIFS), will provide researchers with insights about how this region of the Sun heats so quickly.
“SNIFS is a unique instrument where we implement novel integral field spectroscopy (IFS) technique for the first time to probe the sun’s chromosphere in UV from space,” Said SETI Institute research scientist and co-investigator of the SNIFS sounding rocket mission, Dr. Souvik Bose.
Understanding the Sun’s dynamic outer atmosphere is important because space weather and solar storms can impact communications on Earth, potentially causing GPS blackouts, satellite damage, and affecting the safety of astronauts.
SNIFS is a first-of-its-kind instrument in solar science. It’s an ultraviolet integral field spectrograph (IFS), and this mission marks the first time scientists have used this powerful IFS technology in a heliophysics space mission. Unlike instruments that scan a scene one slit position at a time, SNIFS will observe the chromosphere using rarely explored spectral lines, such as hydrogen Lyman-alpha and Si III/O V, allowing the team to trace plasma flows, heating, and energy release in real-time. It captures full spectral data across a 2D field of view at 1-second cadence — no scanning.
NASA’s sounding rocket missions are small, quick, and less expensive missions with smaller payloads. Teams design them to test new technologies and instruments and determine whether to scale up the technology for larger, multi-year missions in the future. SNIFS observed the Sun for just 10 minutes during its flight, but the data it collected could offer critical insights into the nature of heating of the outer atmosphere of the Sun.
SNIFS targeted a complex active region (AR4143) located slightly to the North-West of the Sun’s disk center, along with NASA’s IRIS and JAXA’s Hinode satellite. While no flares erupted during the flight, targeting this active region ensured that a detailed study could be performed to investigate the heating and mass flows in the solar atmosphere.
The rocket was retrieved immediately upon its return to Earth (landed 50 miles away from the launch site), allowing the team to begin processing the data, which is expected to take a few months.
Despite SNIFS’ short, suborbital flight, the science and technology it’s demonstrating could shape the next generation of solar observatories — and set a precedent for rapid, high-fidelity diagnostics of eruptive events.