Technology
NASA will launch solar wind mission with space telescope in 2025
NASA claims that the Solar Wind and Space Telescope missions will “carpool” into orbit in April 2025. Spaceflight is expected to have five satellites aboard the Falcon 9 rocket, one for astrophysics research and four for solar science research.
On August 3, NASA issued a statement saying that the reason for the “space carpooling” arrangement is to save launch costs and enhance comprehensive launch capabilities. The carpool launch site is located at Vandenberg Space Base in California, USA.
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One of the solar wind missions, officially known as the Coordinated Polarizer for the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH), studies the solar wind, the continuous stream of charged particles flowing from the Sun. NASA added that the four satellites involved in the Solar Wind mission have pushed back their launch dates by two years from 2023 to overcome Sputnik supply chain issues.
Another space mission is the Spectrograph of Cosmic History, Reionization Era, and Ice Explorer (SPHEREx Space Telescope for short), which is scheduled to launch in June 2024. The SPHEREx space telescope will not only map the 300 million galaxies in the universe and 100 million stars in the Milky Way but will also look for signs of water and organic molecules (life-friendly) in space, which are found in stellar breeding zones, where young stars are surrounded by gas and dusty area.
In addition, NASA uses the space telescope to map galaxies in the universe, hoping to find relevant statistical patterns that help explain the rapid expansion of the universe that occurred after the Big Bang.
The telescope is said to be the size of a miniature car (about 1.2 tons), and if all goes according to plan, it will be NASA’s first “near-infrared all-sky spectroscopic mission,” which can observe 102 near-infrared colors. “This will be a major breakthrough, moving from black and white to color,” said Allen Farrington, head of the space program.
At the same time, the PUNCH mission will study solar ejecta and the hot corona, an important breakthrough in NASA’s study of the origin of the solar wind, and will complement the Parker Solar Probe, which periodically enters the corona, for an exploratory survey. The researchers say the corona is being studied to better predict the climate in space, as well as solar activity that could affect life on Earth and satellites near Earth.