SunRISE: Monitoring Solar Radiation Storms From Space (Mission Overview)
NASA’s SunRISE mission is getting ready to reveal the turbulent workings of our star like never before. Short for Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment, SunRISE is an array of six toaster-size spacecraft that will work together to track solar activity and help scientists better understand space weather events.
Our active, churning Sun often sends unpredictable bursts of energy across the solar system in the form of solar flares and coronal mass ejections that can generate beautiful auroras at Earth. While traveling through the Sun’s atmosphere, these energetic events can trigger secondary bursts of solar energetic particles, causing solar radiation storms. At Earth, these storms can damage orbiting spacecraft or unprotected astronauts. SunRISE will map the radio wave emissions that accompany such events for the first time.
In this mission overview, scientists and engineers explain how the mission will help them better understand – and perhaps one day, predict – solar eruptions.
For more information on the SunRISE mission, visit: https://go.nasa.gov/sunrise.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Sun visualizations: NASA GSFC/SDO, SOHO (ESA & NASA); solar particles, radio burst, data transfer, and heliosphere animations: NASA/GSFC Conceptual Image Lab; magnetosphere animation: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio/SWRC/CCMC/SWMF; astronaut footage: NASA/JSC; satellite orbits animation and M1 Flare visualization: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio; stock footage provided by Logoboom/Rozum/Zol/Pond5.
Transcript
Joseph Lazio (SunRISE Project Scientist)
The Sun: It looks like this nice, steady, bright ball in the sky – but there’s all kinds of activity happening.
Shannon Berger (SunRISE Mission Operations Manager)
Our Sun’s just ejecting stuff at us, and we need to figure out how it's happening. SunRISE is a mission that’s going to help us understand solar temper tantrums.
The Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment, or SunRISE, is an array of six toaster-sized SmallSats that will work together to study solar activity. Currently, the scientific community doesn't have a strong understanding of these coronal mass ejections.
Justin Kasper (SunRISE Principal Investigator)
A coronal mass ejection is a violent eruption in material from the sun's atmosphere – or corona – into interplanetary space. We don’t completely understand what causes a coronal mass ejection, but within tens of minutes those particles can reach Earth and several things can happen. If they pass through an astronaut, they can cause radiation sickness. And when they hit spacecraft, they can actually disable electronics.
Your radio stations, your GPS navigation, the ability to text message your friends, or send out an emergency signal if you’re lost while you’re hiking – all of this is dependent on thousands of satellites that are all at risk from these radiation storms.
But, we've noticed something: You never have a major radiation event in space without the coronal mass ejection first giving off a really bright burst of radio waves before the radiation storm starts.
What we're going to do for the first time with SunRISE is we're going to image that radio burst. We're going to say, “What part of the coronal mass ejection is making these radio waves?”
Shannon Berger
We have these four hypotheses about how these particles are accelerated from our Sun.
Joseph Lazio
If we look where the radio emission originates relative to this mass of material moving out into the solar system, it will tell us something about what's the actual process – what's the physics, the underlying physics.
Justin Kasper
The challenge we face with SunRISE is we want to image radio waves from frequencies of around 100 kilohertz to 20 megahertz, and, in order to form a good image at those frequencies, we'd need a telescope that's something like 10 kilometers across. We need to get above Earth and into orbit to be able to see these radio waves clearly. Unfortunately, we don't know how to build 10-kilometer-long structures in space yet.
Shannon Berger
So instead, this is where we got really innovative in the mission design, and they decided, “OK, if we send six toaster-size spacecraft up there and spread them out, we can get the exact same science for lower cost, lower mass, and we can get it now.” We have the technology now to do this – collecting all the radio frequencies and doing the science.
Justin Kasper
We will combine that data on the ground and form, basically, a virtual dish.
Shannon Berger
And that's really where SunRISE shines is because we're able to come back and say concretely, “It's this hypothesis – this is how the particles are accelerating. Now can we understand how to predict these things?”
Joseph Lazio
It's amazing to think about: spacecraft about this big – six of them – flying around the Earth can give us these fundamental insights. By taking these six small things, we end up with actually addressing very big science questions.
Shannon Berger
This is going to help astronauts out in space; this is going to help us here on Earth; and it's going to just help us better understand this essential ball of life that we have at the center of our solar system.