NASA announced Tuesday that it has selected a new instrument to study the Sun and how it generates massive solar flares. The agency’s instrument, called JEDI, will take images of the Sun in extreme ultraviolet light, a type of light that is invisible to our eyes but reveals many basic mechanisms of the Sun’s activity.
Once the two JEDI telescopes are integrated aboard ESA’s Vigil space weather mission, they will focus on the middle layer of the solar corona, a region of the Sun’s atmosphere that plays a key role in creating solar winds and solar flares. That causes space weather.
The Vigil space mission, scheduled to launch in 2031, is expected to provide around-the-clock space weather data from a unique location at the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 5, a gravitationally stable point about 60 degrees behind Earth in its orbit. This observation point will give space weather researchers and forecasters a new angle to study the Sun and its flares. NASA’s JEDI will be the first instrument to provide a stable view of the Sun from this perspective in extreme ultraviolet light, giving scientists a wealth of new data to research while also supporting Vigil’s ability to monitor space weather.
“JEDI observations will help us correlate the features we see on the Sun’s surface with what we measure in the solar atmosphere, the corona,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Combined with Vigil’s first sighting of the Sun, this will change the way we understand the drivers of the Sun’s space weather, which in turn may lead to better warnings to mitigate the effects of space weather on satellites and humans, both in space and in space and on Earth.”
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