NASA launches X-ray solar imager to understand the mysteries of Solar Corona
- In Reports
- 05:32 PM, Aug 03, 2021
- Myind Staff
Researchers at NASA have successfully launched a sophisticated X-ray solar imager on a suborbital flight through a sounding rocket to gather new information and potentially unravel the mysteries as to how and why the Sun’s corona grows so much hotter than the temperature on its surface.
The developers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, have named the mission “MaGIXS” (acronym for Marshall Grazing Incidence X-ray Spectrometer). It was launched from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico on July 30.
"Our knowledge of the corona’s heating mechanisms is limited, partly because we’ve not yet been able to make detailed observations and measurements of the temperature distribution of the solar plasma in the region,” said Marshall heliophysicist Amy Winebarger, principal investigator for the MaGIXS mission.
The corona is the outermost part of the Sun’s atmosphere, which is usually hidden by the bright light of the Sun. The outermost part is visible during a total solar eclipse when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun. As the Moon blocks out the bright light of the Sun, the glowing corona, which looks like a halo, is seen.
The Sun’s surface temperature is more than 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, but the corona routinely measures more than 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit.
One of the most pressing questions in astrophysics, Winebarger said, it is how this process occurs.
She said that NASA routinely uses sounding rockets for such brief, focused science missions. They’re often smaller, more affordable, and faster to design and build than large-scale satellite missions.
“They offer unique, suborbital science opportunities, a chance to develop innovative new instrumentation, and rapid return on investment,” she added.
The MaGIXS mission dispatched its payload, which is inclusive of a high-powered camera, telescope, and X-ray spectrometer containing a matched pair of grazing incidence parabolic mirrors, to conduct studies on “soft” X-rays at a wavelength that hasn’t been previously observed in such detail.
NASA said soft X-ray spectrometer missions launched in the past had only observed the Sun’s corona over a fairly large field of view or with limited energy diagnostic capabilities. The MaGIXS will be the first imager to measure specific temperature distributions at different parts of an active solar region.
Image courtesy: NASA
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