Solar storms in recent months have made some astronomical language sound less like gibberish to us. One of those words is coronal mass ejection, or CME. This happens when the surface of the Sun erupts on a semi-regular basis. And it affects us directly. Some of these eruptions are the width of the Earth, but others can be up to 50 times larger than our planet, according to NASA. Add to that their temperature (above 10 million degrees, hotter than the surface of the Sun) and speed: up to 3000 km/s, which allows them to reach our planet in just 15 to 18 hours. As if all this were not enough, strange radio signals are also hidden there.
Scientists know that the source of these radio bursts is located somewhere inside CMEs, but these solar flares are enormous. To clear up the mystery, NASA has launched a new mission called the CubeSat Radio Interferometry Experiment (CURIE) to investigate these radio bursts by deploying a pair of small satellites in orbit around the Earth that will measure them separately.
“This is a very ambitious and exciting mission,” explains David Sundkvist, CURIE’s principal scientist, in a statement. “This is the first time that anyone has flown a radio interferometer in space in a controlled manner, so It is a pioneer for radio astronomy in general.”.
The CURIE mission consists of twin cubesats (very small satellites, about the size of a shoebox) carried into orbit aboard the European Space Agency’s Ariane 6 rocket, which was just launched on Tuesday.
The plan is deploy them about 500 kilometers above the Earth’s surfacewhere using dual eight-foot antennas, the satellites will be able to scan for radio waves between 0.1 and 19 megahertz that would otherwise be absorbed by Earth’s upper atmosphere.
Most importantly, the satellites will also be deployed at a distance of about 3 kilometers from each other. By measuring the extremely small differences in the time it takes for radio signals to arrive For each satellite, scientists will try to calculate precisely where they came from.
There are good reasons to invest in the details of solar events like CMEs. Along with their enormous bombardments of solar material, they also send powerful magnetic fields that can affect the planets of the solar system in ways we may not yet understand.
On Earth, magnetic fields wreak havoc on our atmosphere (sometimes with eye-catching results like the Northern Lights), but they can also severely disrupt electronic infrastructure and communications. CMEs can be difficult to predict and its relationship to solar flares (explosions that send powerful bursts of radiation into space) is unclear.
CURIE is a novel experiment and hopefully, will mark a step forward in space observations of our Sun which will pave the way to a better understanding of the role that solar flares play in the solar system.