NASA teams up with UCLan to study the Sun

Physicists and engineers from the University of Central Lancashire partnered with NASA on a new mission to gather new information on the workings of the Sun.

Launching from New Mexico, a sophisticated X-ray solar imager was sent on a brief suborbital flight via sounding rocket to learn more about how and why the Sun’s corona grows so much hotter - routinely measuring more than 1.8 million degrees Celsius - than its actual surface, a mere 10,000 degrees Celsius.

Past soft X-ray spectrometer missions have only observed the Sun’s corona over a fairly large field of view, or with limited energy diagnostic capabilities. This project will be the first imager to measure specific temperature distributions at different parts of an active solar region. That precision data will help scientists resolve the debate concerning how, and how often, the corona is superheated.

The mission has been named MaGIXS by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama – short for Marshall Grazing Incidence X-ray Spectrometer. 

Professor Robert Walsh, Professor Darren Ansell and research associate Ben Watkinson from UCLan provided software to analyse the slitjaw images, which enable the science team to determine where the payload is pointing in real time during flight.

Professor Walsh, institutional project lead, said: “The relationship we have formed with NASA Marshall and partners over the last decade demonstrates UCLan’s research capabilities in this arena.

“Our physicists and engineers played an integral part in developing the MaGIXS instrument. The opportunity this gives to look at the Sun and understand its activity is astounding. The findings from the MaGIXS mission will help us to understand the outer atmosphere of the Sun, learn more about the gases that erupt from it and what mechanisms generate the energy it releases; all of which have knock on effects on Earth.”

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