WASHINGTON, May 21, 2024
/PRNewswire/ -- NASA announced Tuesday it selected a new instrument
to study the Sun and how it creates massive solar eruptions. The
agency's Joint EUV coronal Diagnostic Investigation, or JEDI, will
capture images of the Sun in extreme ultraviolet light, a type of
light invisible to our eyes but reveals many of the underlying
mechanisms of the Sun's activity.
Once integrated aboard the ESA's (European Space Agency's) Vigil
space weather mission, JEDI's two telescopes will focus on the
middle layer of the solar corona, a region of the Sun's atmosphere
that plays a key role in creating the solar wind and the solar
eruptions that cause space weather.
The Vigil space mission, planned to launch in 2031, is expected
to provide around-the-clock space weather data from a unique
position at Sun-Earth Lagrange point 5 – a gravitationally stable
point about 60 degrees behind Earth in its orbit. This vantage
point will give space weather researchers and forecasters a new
angle to study the Sun and its eruptions. NASA's JEDI will be the
first instrument to provide a constant view of the Sun from this
perspective in extreme ultraviolet light – giving scientists a
trove of new data for research, while simultaneously
supporting Vigil's ability to monitor space weather.
"JEDI's observations will help us link the features we see on
the Sun's surface with what we measure in the solar atmosphere, the
corona," said Nicola Fox, associate
administrator, Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in
Washington. "Combined with Vigil's
first-of-its-kind, eagle eye view of the Sun, this will change the
way we understand the Sun's drivers of space weather – which in
turn can lead to improved warnings to mitigate space weather
effects on satellites and humans in space as well as on Earth."
The project is led by Don Hassler
at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. The instrument is funded by
the NASA Heliophysics Space Weather Program with a total cost not
to exceed $45 million. Management
oversight will be provided by the Living With a Star Program of the
Explorers & Heliophysics Projects Division at NASA's Goddard
Space Flight Center in Greenbelt,
Maryland.
For more information on NASA heliophysics missions, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/heliophysics
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SOURCE NASA