Posted on by Jason Major

Flashback: 1978 NASA Film Shows Viking Discoveries

In what’s a sort of foreshadowing of the upcoming August 5 MSL landing, which is being called “seven minutes of terror”, here’s a flashback film from 1978 called “19 Minutes to Earth” which looks at the discoveries made by the Viking orbiter and lander, which made its historic arrival on Mars 36 years ago, on July 20, 1976.

In true late ’70s style the video is full of funky music and (what was then) state-of-the-art video graphics. Awesome.


Even more than the music, though, what’s interesting about the 1978 film is how the subject of microbial life is discussed. Both Viking 1 and 2 were designed to search for evidence of biological activity on Mars, which they did by digging into the Martian soil and looking for signs of resulting respiration.

Although the results were initially deemed inconclusive, further research into the Viking data has prompted some scientists to claim that the landers did, in fact, find evidence of life on Mars.

It’s still a much-debated topic, one that scientists hope to help settle with the upcoming research performed by Curiosity and the Mars Science Laboratory mission.

Funky music and all, the Viking programs paved the way for all future missions to Mars. Lessons learned from Viking technology have blazed the trail for Mars research, from Pathfinder’s Sojourner rover to Spirit and Opportunity, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and ESA’s Mars Express. Very soon Curiosity will continue on with the legacy of robotic exploration of the Red Planet, and someday I’m sure our children and grandchildren will look back at the “funky videos” of our time.

Let’s hope that by then they’ve made their own great strides in space exploration and have found answers to the questions that inspire us today.

Video: NASA. Image: artist’s concept of the Viking lander (NASA).

Posted on by Jason Major

The Top 5 “Earth as Art” Images, Thanks to Landsat

NASA’s first Earth-observing Landsat satellite launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on July 23, 1972, and to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the program they asked the public to vote on their favorite images of the planet from the Landsat Earth as Art gallery. After over 14,000 votes, these were chosen as the top 5 favorites. Happy 40th anniversary, Landsat!

Landsat images from space are not merely pictures. They contain many layers of data collected at different points along the visible and invisible light spectrum. A single Landsat scene taken from 400 miles above Earth can accurately detail the condition of hundreds of thousands of acres of grassland, agricultural crops or forests.

“Landsat has given us a critical perspective on our planet over the long term and will continue to help us understand the big picture of Earth and its changes from space,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “With this view we are better prepared to take action on the ground and be better stewards of our home.”

In cooperation with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), a science agency of the Interior Department, NASA launched six of the seven Landsat satellites. The resulting archive of Earth observations forms a comprehensive record of human and natural land changes.

“The first 40 years of the Landsat program have delivered the most consistent and reliable record of Earth’s changing landscape.”

– Michael Freilich, director of NASA’s Earth Science Division

“Over four decades, data from the Landsat series of satellites have become a vital reference worldwide for advancing our understanding of the science of the land,” said Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar. “The 40-year Landsat archive forms an indelible and objective register of America’s natural heritage and thus it has become part of this department’s legacy to the American people.”

The next satellite in the series, the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) is scheduled to launch on February 11, 2013.

(Source: NASA/GSFC)

Find out more about the ongoing Landsat mission here, and see recent visualizations from Landsat on the USGS site here.

Video: NASA/GSFC. Inset image: Industrial growth in Binhai New Area, China.  Sub-feature: Erg Iguidi, an area of ever-shifting sand dunes extending from Algeria into Mauritania in northwestern Africa, one of the chosen top 5 Earth as Art images. NASA/GSFC/USGS.

Posted on by Jason Major

HI-C Returns Most Detailed Images Ever of the Sun’s Corona

NASA’s High Resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C) mission, launched Wednesday, July 11 from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, successfully returned (as promised!) the highest-resolution images of the Sun’s corona ever acquired. These images of the dynamic million-degree region of the Sun’s atmosphere will provide scientists with more information on the complex activity found near the Sun’s surface and how it affects space weather throughout the Solar System.

Launched aboard a 58-foot-tall (17 meter) Black Brant sounding rocket, Hi-C was equipped with exceptionally well-made mirrors — some of the finest ever made, according to the mission report. These mirrors allowed Hi-C to image a section of the Sun’s corona in extreme ultraviolet light with a resolution of 0.1 arcsec/pixel, distinguishing features as small as 135 miles (217 km) across. That’s five times the resolution of SDO images, or any previous space telescope for that matter.

That’s like the difference between watching a program on a tube television and an HD flatscreen monitor.

The image below shows the same region as seen by SDO’s AIA array and Hi-C’s innovative mirror-and-“light-maze” system:

Read: NASA to Launch the Finest Mirrors Ever Made

“These revolutionary images of the sun demonstrate the key aspects of NASA’s sounding rocket program, namely the training of the next generation of principal investigators, the development of new space technologies, and scientific advancements,” said Barbara Giles, director for NASA’s Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

During its 620-second suborbital flight, Hi-C took 165 images of a section of the Sun’s corona 135,000 miles (271,000 km) across, capturing wavelengths of light at 193 Angstroms emitted by the Sun’s super-hot 1.5 million kelvin corona. The images were focused on a large sunspot region, whose position was accurately predicted 27 days prior to launch.

“We have an exceptional instrument and launched at the right time,” said Jonathan Cirtain, senior heliophysicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. “Because of the intense solar activity we’re seeing right now, we were able to clearly focus on a sizeable, active sunspot and achieve our imaging goals.”

Even though Hi-C’s flight only lasted ten minutes, of which 330 seconds were used for acquiring images, the amount of data gathered will be used by researchers for months.

“Even though this mission was only a few minutes long, it marks a big breakthrough in coronal studies,” said Leon Golub, lead investigator from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “The Hi-C flight might be the most productive five minutes I’ve ever spent.”

Watch a 10-second video of the region shown above, seen from both Hi-C and SDO:

Read more about the Hi-C mission results here.

Image credits: NASA

Posted on by Jason Major

Independent Filmmaker Wants to Kickstart America’s Space Program

“If Kennedy said ‘we will go to the Moon…some time before the century ends,’ what is… what is that? That’s not ambition. That’s pandering.”
– Neil deGrasse Tyson, Fight for Space

Here we are on the 43rd anniversary of the Apollo Moon landing, with no more shuttles flying, slashed space program budgets and no real targeted plan to get people off this world and onto another. American students score abysmally in science and math, and the general public thinks NASA is dead. What’s happened to America’s drive? What’s happened to the nation’s sense of wonder, its devotion to science, engineering, education and its man-on-the-Moon motivation?

Film producer Paul Hildebrandt wants to find out. But he needs your help.

Hildebrandt and his team from Eventide Visuals in Chico, CA, are creating an independent feature-length documentary about America’s space program, called “Fight for Space”. It’s not a collection of launch videos and CGI solar system shots, though; Hildebrandt is digging deeper into what originally made the U.S. space program great — and what has happened to it since then.

“We are producing a documentary that will examine the reasons why our space program is not all it can be. We are also going to show that space IS worth the time, money, and energy that it needs, not for only exploration and scientific reasons but for economic, planetary security, and cultural reasons as well,” writes Hildebrandt.

Hildebrandt has been attending space symposiums and traveling to interview key figures in science and space outreach, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Robert Zubrin and Congressman Dana Rohrabacher. He’s talked with scientists, astronauts, educators and regular everyday Americans about the importance of the space program. But in order for the Fight to continue, he needs our help.

Fortunately, that’s what Kickstarter is here for. Fight for Space is looking to get a little backing from interested and like-minded space fans to keep the process moving, and hopefully see the film become a fully produced, publicized, and possibly broadcasted reality.

“With your help we can bring awareness to this issue and come closer to making our space program a priority for this country once again.”

You can pledge any amount, from $10 to $10,000 or more (and see the incremental rewards of doing so) on the Fight for Space Kickstarter page here, and visit the Fight for Space website here.

“Please, support our film by donating above and share this project with your friends, family, and anyone you know who cares about space exploration or cares about the future economic and national security of this country.”
– Paul Hildebrandt, Fight for Space producer

Posted on by Jason Major

Postcards From The (Inner) Edge

As the world turns its gaze outward in anticipation of the arrival of Mars Science Laboratory — with its hair-raising “seven minutes of terror” landing — let’s take a moment to look back inward, where MESSENGER is still faithfully orbiting the first rock from the Sun, Mercury, and sending back images that could only have been imagined just a few years ago.

The image above shows the graben-gouged terrain around Balanchine crater, within Mercury’s vast Caloris Basin impact crater. Named for the co-founder of the New York City Ballet, Balanchine crater is 41 km (25.5 miles) in diameter and filled with the curious erosion features known as hollows. Graben — basically sunken troughs in the surface — are the result of extensional forces that have pulled sections of the planet’s upper crust apart.

This image shows the peak-ring structure located within the much larger crater Rustaveli, which is 180 km (112 miles) in diameter. One of the more recently-named craters (the IAU convention for new features on Mercury has them titled after renowned artists, writers and composers from history) Rustaveli is named for a 12th-century Georgian poet who wrote the epic “The Knight in the Panther’s Skin”. The crater that now bears his namesake is located on Mercury’s northern hemisphere.

These two craters — also located within Caloris Basin — don’t yet have names but are no less interesting. Their overlapping positions works like an optical illusion, making the newer,sharper-edged crater on the right seem to almost float above the surface. The false-color of the image highlights the difference in surface composition of the two craters, which are both about 40 km (24 miles) wide. (The Caloris Basin in which they reside, however, is one of the largest known impact sites in our solar system, measuring at 1550 km — 963 miles — across!)

Now we zoom out for a wider view of our solar system’s second-densest planet (Earth is the first) and take a look at an image that’s night and day — literally! This is Mercury’s terminator, the twilit dividing line between night and day. More than just making a pretty picture, data on this transition is valuable to scientists as some atmospheric phenomena can only be observed at the terminator, such as the interaction between surface dust and charged particles from the Sun (which, at less than half the distance to the Sun than we are, Mercury is constantly bathed in.)

And now to zoom back in, we get a good look at an unnamed central-peaked crater about 85 km (52 miles) across in an oblique view  that highlights the hollows and depressions within its floor. Acquired as part of what’s called a “targeted observation”, high-resolution images like this (79 meters/pixel) allow scientists to closely investigate specific features — but sadly there’s just not enough mission time to image all of Mercury at this level of detail.

On March 17, 2011 (March 18, 2011, UTC), MESSENGER became the first spacecraft ever to orbit Mercury. The mission has provided the first data from Mercury since Mariner 10, over 30 years ago. After over 1,000 orbits, 98 percent of Mercury is now imaged in detail, allowing us to know more about our solar system’s innermost world than ever before.

Keep up with MESSENGER updates (and the latest images) on the mission website here.

Image credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
Posted on by Jason Major

The Audacity to Dream

Making its debut at the TEDxISU (International Space University) event on July 6, the video above is an inspirational call-to-arms for anyone who’s ever looked to the stars and dreamed of a day when the sky was, in fact, not the limit. From Sputnik to Space Station, from Vostok to Virgin Galactic, the video reminds us of the spirit of adventure that unites us, regardless of time or place or politics. Dreaming, after all, is universal.

Check it out.

“A planet is the cradle of mind, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.”
– Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

Posted on by John Williams

Rethinking the Source of Earth’s Water

Artist's impression of an asteroid impact on early Earth (credit: NASA)
Artist's impression of an asteroid impact on early Earth (credit: NASA)

Earth, with its blue hue visible from space, is known for its abundant water – predominately locked in oceans – that may have come from an extraterrestrial source. New research indicates that the source of Earth’s water isn’t from ice-rich comets, but instead from water-bearing asteroids.

Looking at the ratio of hydrogen to deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen, in frozen water, scientists can get a pretty good idea of the distance the water formed in the solar system. Comets and asteroids farther from the Sun have a higher deuterium content than ice formed closer to the Sun. Scientists, led by the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Conel Alexander, compared water from comets and from carbonaceous chondrites. What they found challenges current models in how the solar system formed.

Primeval Earth was a hot and dry place. Any water that may have formed with Earth was boiled away from the scorching crust. Ultraviolet light from the newly formed Sun stripped hydrogen atoms from the water molecules leaving no rain to fall back on the surface. Scientists believe that both comets and carbonaceous asteroids formed beyond the orbit of Jupiter, perhaps at the very fringes of the solar system, then moved inward bringing both water and organic material to Earth. If this were true, Alexander and his colleagues suggest that ice found in comets and the remnants of ice preserved in carbonaceous chondrites in the form of clays would have similar isotopic composition.

After studying 85 carbonaceous chondrites, supplied by Johnson Space Center and the Meteorite Working Group, they show in a paper released today by Science Express that they likely did not form in the same regions of the solar system as comets because they have much lower deuterium content. They formed closer to the Sun, perhaps in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. And its that material that rained on early Earth to create the wet planet we know today.

“Our results provide important new constraints for the origin of volatiles in the inner solar system, including the Earth,” Alexander said. “And they have important implications for the current models of the formation and orbital evolution of the planets and smaller objects in our solar system.”

Image caption: Artist impression of an asteroid impact on early Earth (credit: NASA)

Image caption 2: This is a cross-section of a chondritic meteorite.

Posted on by Ken Kremer

Dawn’s Vestan Endeavour Exceptionally Exciting near End of Year-Long Super Science Survey

Image Caption: Divalia Fossa equatorial trough at Vesta pictured in side by side images showing apparent brightness and topography. The trough encircles most of Vesta and is located just south of the equator. It is about 10 kilometers (6 miles) wide. Rubria and Occia craters straddle Divalia Fossa. The image was snapped on Oct 16, 2011 from an altitude of 700 km (435 mi) from the HAMO mapping orbit. Image Credit: NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ UCLA/ MPS/ DLR/ IDA

“NASA’s Dawn mission to Asteroid Vesta is going exceptionally well”, Dr. Marc Rayman, the mission’s Chief Engineer, told Universe Today in an exclusive interview as the revolutionary spacecraft nears the end of its more than 1 year long super science survey orbiting the giant space rock.

“The Dawn mission is not only going better than we had expected but even better than we had hoped.”

Dawn is Earth’s first mission ever to orbit and explore Vesta up close.

“We have acquired so much more data than we had planned even in late 2011! We have conducted a tremendous exploration of Vesta – the second most massive body between Mars and Jupiter, a giant of the main asteroid belt.”

“Now we are in our second high altitude mapping orbit (HAMO2), which is the final intensive campaign of the Vesta mission,” Rayman told me.

Image Caption: Dawn Orbiting Vesta above the “Snowman” craters. This artist’s concept shows NASA’s Dawn spacecraft orbiting the giant asteroid Vesta above the Snowman craters. The depiction of Vesta is based on images obtained by Dawn’s framing cameras. Dawn is an international collaboration of the US, Germany and Italy. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Indeed Dawn’s science and maneuvering endeavour’s at Vesta have proceeded so flawlessly that NASA has granted the science team a bonus of 40 days additional time in orbit split between the lower and higher science orbits known as LAMO and HAMO or the Low Altitude Mapping Orbit and the High Altitude Mapping Orbit respectively.

“Our original Vesta departure date was July 17, and now it is about August 26.” Rayman explained.

The bonus time at LAMO has already been completed. Now the team is about to begin the bonus time at HAMO – consisting of two additional mapping cycles beyond the four originally planned.

Each mapping cycle in HAMO2 consists of 10 orbits. Each orbit is about 12.5 hours.

“On July 14, we will complete mapping cycle 4 and begin 5 (of 6). On July 25 we will leave HAMO2 and escape from orbit on August 26. We will stop thrusting several times before escape to take more neat pictures, mostly of the northern hemisphere,” Rayman told me.

“As Dawn revolves, Vesta rotates on its axis beneath it, turning once every 5.3 hours.”

When Dawn arrived in orbit at Vesta in July 2011 the northern polar region was in darkness as the southern hemisphere basked in summer’s glow. Now as Dawn departs Vesta in August, virtually all of the previously unseen and unphotographed northern polar region is illuminated and will be mapped in exquisite detail.

Coincidentally on July 13/14 as HAMO2 Cycle 4 ends, I’ll be presenting a free public lecture about Dawn and NASA’s Planetary and Human Spaceflight programs at the Adirondack Public Observatory.

Image Caption: Asteroid Vesta and Mysterious Equatorial Grooves – from Dawn Orbiter. This full view of the giant asteroid Vesta was taken by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft on July 24, 2011, at a distance of 3,200 miles (5,200 kilometers). This view shows impact craters of various sizes and mysterious grooves parallel to the equator. The resolution of this image is about 500 meters per pixel. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Why has Dawn been granted an extended mission ?

“Dawn has gone so well that we had consumed not even one day of our 40 days of operations margin,” Rayman stated .

“That allowed us to spend more time in LAMO. We had had some unexpected events to be sure, but we managed to deal with all of them so expeditiously that the entire margin remained intact. Then we received the (entirely unrelated) 40 day extension, which allowed us to leave Vesta later. That came about because of our being able to shorten the flight from Vesta to Ceres, so we could still reach Ceres on schedule in 2015.”

“That 40 days allowed us to spend still ~ 30 more days in LAMO and increase HAMO2 by 10 days to a total of six cycles. We got still more time by finding ways to make the trip from HAMO2 to escape a little more efficiently, and that’s what allowed HAMO2 to be even longer, with the additional eight days of VIR-only observations I described in my most recent Dawn Journal.”

“The summary is that every investigation has been more productive than we could have imagined, and because the exploration of Vesta has gone so well, we have been able to apply our unused margin to get even more out of the mission. It is very very gratifying and exciting.”

So we have a few more weeks to enjoy the wondrous sights of Vesta before Dawn fires up her revolutionary ion thrusters to escape the gravitational tug of Vesta and head off to the dwarf planet Ceres, the largest asteroid in the main belt of our Solar System – and which some have speculated may hold vast caches of water and perhaps even liquid oceans suitable for sustaining life.

Ken Kremer

…..
July 13/14: Free Public Lectures about NASA’s Mars, Vesta and Planetary Exploration, the Space Shuttle, SpaceX , Orion and more by Ken Kremer at the Adirondack Public Observatory in Tupper Lake, NY.

Posted on by John Williams

Hubble Spies Tiny, Ancient ‘Ghost Galaxies’

These Hubble images show the dim, star-starved dwarf galaxy Leo IV. The image at left shows part of the galaxy, outlined by the white rectangular box. The box measures 83 light-years wide by 163 light-years long. The few stars in Leo IV are lost amid neighboring stars and distant galaxies. A close-up view of the background galaxies within the box is shown in the middle image. The image at right shows only the stars in Leo IV. The galaxy, which contains several thousand stars, is composed of sun-like stars, fainter, red dwarf stars, and some red giant stars brighter than the sun. Credit: NASA, ESA, and T. Brown (STScI)

They’re out there; tiny, extremely faint and incredibly ancient dwarf galaxies with so few stars that scientists call them ‘ghost galaxies.’ NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured images of three of these small-fry galaxies in hopes of unraveling a mystery 13 billion years in the making.

Astronomers believe these tiny, ghost-like galaxies spotted alongside the Milky Way Galaxy are among the oldest, tiniest and most pristine galaxies in the Universe. Hubble views reveal that their stars share the same birth date. The galaxies all started forming stars more than 13 billions years ago but then abruptly stopped within just one billion years after the Universe was born.

“These galaxies are all ancient and they’re all the same age, so you know something came down like a guillotine and turned off the star formation at the same time in these galaxies,” said Tom Brown of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., the study’s leader. “The most likely explanation is reionization.”

Reionization of the Universe began in the first billion years after the Big Bang. During this time, radiation from the first stars knocked electrons off hydrogen atoms, ionizing the hydrogen gas. This process also allowed hydrogen gas to become transparent to ultraviolet light. This same process may also have squashed star-making in dwarf galaxies, such as those in Brown’s study. These galaxies are tiny cousins to star-making dwarf galaxies near the Milky Way. And because of their small size, just 2,000 light-years across, they were not massive enough to shield themselves from the harsh ultraviolet light of the early Universe which stripped away their meager supply of hydrogen gas, leaving them unable to make new stars.

Astronomers proposed many reasons for the lack of stars in these galaxies in addition to the reioniation theory. Some scientists believed internal events such as supernovae blasted away the gas needed to create new stars. Others suggested that the galaxies simply used up their supply of hydrogen gas needed to make stars.

Brown measured the stars’ ages by looking at their brightness and colors. The stellar populations in these fossil galaxies range from a few hundred to a few thousand stars; some sun-like, some red dwarfs and some red stars larger than our Sun. When evidence showed that the stars were indeed ancient, Brown enlisted the help of Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys to burrow deep within six galaxies to determine when they were born. So far, the team has finished analyzing data for three; Hercules, Leo IV and Ursa Major. The galaxies lie between 330,000 light-years to 490,000 light-years. For comparison, Brown compared the galaxies’ stars with those found in M92, a 13 billion-year-old globular cluster located about 26,000 light-years from Earth. He found they are of similar age.

“These are the fossils of the earliest galaxies in the universe,” Brown said. “They haven’t changed in billions of years. These galaxies are unlike most nearby galaxies, which have long star-formation histories.”

Brown’s discovery could help explain the so-called “missing satellite problem.” Astronomers have observed only a few dozen dwarf galaxies around the Milky Way while computer simulations predict thousands should exist. But perhaps they do exist. The Sloan survey found more than a dozen tiny, star-starved galaxies in the Milky Way’s neighborhood while scanning just a portion of the sky. Astronomers think that dozens more ultra-faint galaxies may lurk undetected with the possibility of thousands of even smaller dwarfs containing virtually no stars.

The tiny galaxies may be star-deprived but they still have an abundance of dark matter, the framework upon which galaxies are built. Normal dwarf galaxies near the Milky Way Galaxy contain ten times more dark matter than ordinary visible matter. Brown explains that these tiny galaxies are now islands of mostly dark matter, unseen for billions of years until astronomers began finding them in the Sloan Survey.

Brown’s results appear in the July 1 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Image caption 1: These Hubble images show the dim, star-starved dwarf galaxy Leo IV. The image at left shows part of the galaxy, outlined by the white rectangular box. The box measures 83 light-years wide by 163 light-years long. The few stars in Leo IV are lost amid neighboring stars and distant galaxies. A close-up view of the background galaxies within the box is shown in the middle image. The image at right shows only the stars in Leo IV. The galaxy, which contains several thousand stars, is composed of sun-like stars, fainter, red dwarf stars, and some red giant stars brighter than the sun. Credit: NASA, ESA, and T. Brown (STScI)

Image caption 2: These computer simulations show a swarm of dark matter clumps around our Milky Way galaxy. Some of the dark-matter concentrations are massive enough to spark star formation. Thousands of clumps of dark matter coexist with our Milky Way galaxy, shown in the center of the top panel. The green blobs in the middle panel are those dark-matter chunks massive enough to obtain gas from the intergalactic medium and trigger ongoing star formation, eventually creating dwarf galaxies. In the bottom panel, the red blobs are ultra-faint dwarf galaxies that stopped forming stars long ago. Credit: NASA, ESA, and T. Brown and J. Tumlinson (STScI)

Posted on by Jason Major

NASA To Launch The Finest Mirrors Ever Made

This Wednesday NASA will launch its High Resolution Coronal Imager (HI-C) mission from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, sending a sounding rocket above the atmosphere with some of the best mirrors ever made to capture incredibly-detailed ultraviolet images of our Sun.

HI-C will use a state-of-the-art imaging system to focus on a region near the center of the Sun about 135,000 miles (271,000 km) across. During its brief flight — only ten minutes long — HI-C will return some of the most detailed images of the Sun’s corona ever acquired, with a resolution five times that of previous telescopes… including NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.

While SDO collects images in ten wavelengths, however, HI-C will focus on just one: 193 Angstroms, a wavelength of ultraviolet radiation that best reveals the structures of the Sun’s corona present in temperatures of 1.5 million kelvin. And although HI-C’s mirrors aren’t any larger than SDO’s — about 9.5 inches in diameter — they are “some of the finest ever made.” In addition, an interior “maze” between mirrors effectively increases HI-C’s focal length.

Researchers expect HI-C’s super-smooth mirrors to resolve coronal structures as small as 100 miles (160 km) across (0.1 arcsec/pixel).

“Other instruments in space can’t resolve things that small, but they do suggest – after detailed computer analysis of the amount of light in any given pixel – that structures in the sun’s atmosphere are about 100 miles across,” said Jonathan Cirtain, project scientist for HI-C at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. “And we also have theories about the shapes of structures in the atmosphere, or corona, that expect that size. HI-C will be the first chance we have to see them.”

One of the main goals of HI-C will be to place significant new constraints on theories of coronal heating and structuring, by observing the small-scale processes that exist everywhere in hot magnetized coronal plasma and establishing whether or not there are additional structures below what can currently be seen.

“This instrument could push the limits on theories of coronal heating, answering questions such as why the temperature of the sun’s corona is millions of degrees higher than that of the surface,” said Marshall’s Dr. Jonathan Cirtain, heliophysicist and principle investigator on the mission.

Read more on the NASA news release here.

Top image: A Black Brant sounding rocket containing NASA’s HI-C mission will launch on July 11, 2012 to observe the sun’s corona. (NASA) Bottom image: TRACE image of the Sun at a resolution of 0.5 arcsec/pixel. HI-C will have a resolution 5 times finer.