The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has awarded the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) with the contract to develop a high-latitude mission to image the Sun's poles.
The SwRI proposal aims to better understand the poles present in our own Sun, considered as among the remaining unexplored parts of the Solar System. It is one of the five proposed scientific investigations chosen by NASA to be a possible mission in the future.
SwRI's Solaris Proposal
The Solaris mission is led by Dr. Don Hassler, SwRI program director, as its principal investigator. In a press release from the Southwest Research Institute, the solar polar mission, to be conducted with Medium-Class Explorers (MIDEX), will "revolutionize our understanding of the Sun" by answering questions with information only available from a polar vantage point.
"Solaris will explore one of the last unseen places in the solar system, the poles of the Sun," Hassler said. He also noted the previous Ulysses mission, a joint endeavor between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). First launched in 1990, it was tasked with orbiting the sun and studying it from all latitudes. Throughout its commissioned lifetime, it was able to take three fast latitude scans of the Sun, also observing several comets in the process.
While the Ulysses probe visited the polar regions, it did not have the necessary remote sensing instruments installed in order to probe the Sun's polar magnetic field and surface/ subsurface flows, according to Hassler.
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Equipped to Image the Sun's Poles
In a Twitter post from Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's Science Mission Directorate Associate Administrator, Hassler explains how to send the future generation of spacecraft to the Sun's poles. The Solaris mission will first be launched towards Jupiter, using the gas giant's gravity to "slingshot" out of the ecliptic plane and fly over the Sun's poles, attaining a position of 75 degrees latitude.
Solaris: Revealing the Mysteries of the Sun's Poles would address fundamental questions of solar and stellar physics that can only be answered with a view of the Sun's poles. Solaris is led by Donald Hassler at the @SwRI in Boulder, Colorado. pic.twitter.com/aTX9qiaetY — Thomas Zurbuchen (@Dr_ThomasZ) August 28, 2020
This high latitude position of the Solaris should allow imaging of the Sun's poles, revealing clues for scientists to better understand the behavior of the Sun's polar magnetic fields and flows, and how these phenomena affect the solar activity cycle.
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The spacecraft to be used in the Solaris mission will be provided by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation, also located in Boulder, Colorado, the same as the SwRI branch where Hassler is based. Among the payloads included in the study are a compact Doppler magnetograph, which will gather data from the polar magnetic fields and subsurface flows, a white light coronagraph for imaging the solar corona from its high-latitude vantage, and an extreme ultraviolet (UV) instrument for imaging the surface of the poles expected to reach a million degrees Celsius.
Should the shortlisted proposal be given the green light for flight, the earliest date for launch is somewhere in early 2025. The Solaris mission will be a joint effort between SwRI and a number of local and international key partners including the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, Ball Aerospace, Northrop Grumman, National Center for Atmospheric Research's High Altitude Observatory, the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and more.
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