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    • By European Space Agency
      In the run up to April’s total solar eclipse, ESA-led Solar Orbiter and NASA-led Parker Solar Probe are both at their closest approach to the Sun. They are taking the opportunity to join hands in studying the driving rain of plasma that streams from the Sun, fills the Solar System, and causes dazzlement and destruction at Earth.
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    • By NASA
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      ESA, NASA Solar Observatory Discovers Its 5,000th Comet
      On March 25, 2024, a citizen scientist in the Czech Republic spotted a comet in an image from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft, which has now been confirmed to be the 5,000th comet discovered using SOHO data. SOHO has achieved this milestone over 28 years in space, even though it was never designed to be a comet hunter.
      The 5,000th comet discovered with the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft is noted by a small white box in the upper left portion of this image. A zoomed-in inset shows the comet as a faint dot between the white vertical lines. The image was taken on March 25, 2024, by SOHO’s Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO), which uses a disk to block the bright Sun and reveal faint features around it. NASA/ESA/SOHO The comet is a small body made of ice and rock that takes only a few years to orbit the Sun. It belongs to the “Marsden group” of comets. This group is thought to be related to comet 96P/Machholz (which SOHO observes when Machholz passes near the Sun every 5.3 years) and is named for the late scientist Brian Marsden who first recognized the group using SOHO observations. Only about 75 of the 5,000 comets discovered with SOHO belong to the Marsden group.
      A joint mission of ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA, SOHO launched in December 1995 to study the Sun and the dynamics in its outer atmosphere, called the corona. A science instrument on SOHO, called the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO), uses an artificial disk to block the blinding light of the Sun so scientists can study the corona and environment immediately around the Sun.
      This also allows SOHO to do something many other spacecraft cannot – see comets flying close to the Sun, known as “sungrazing” comets or “sungrazers.” Many of these comets only brighten when they’re too close to the Sun for other observatories to see and would otherwise go undetected, lost in the bright glare of our star. While scientists expected SOHO to serendipitously find some comets during its mission, the spacecraft’s ability to spot them has made it the most prolific comet-finder in history – discovering more than half of the comets known today.
      In fact, soon after SOHO launched, people around the world began spotting so many comets in its images that mission scientists needed a way to keep track of them all. In the early 2000s, they launched the NASA-funded Sungrazer Project that allows anyone to report comets they find in SOHO images.
      This animation shows the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory’s 5,000th comet (circled) moving across the field relative to background stars. The images in this sequence were taken with the spacecraft’s Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) instrument. NASA/ESA/SOHO SOHO’s 5,000th comet was found by Hanjie Tan, a Sungrazer Project participant who is originally from Guangzhou, China, and is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in astronomy in Prague, Czech Republic. Tan has been participating in the Sungrazer Project since he was 13 years old and is one of the project’s youngest comet discoverers.
      “Since 2009, I’ve discovered over 200 comets,” Tan said. “I got into the Sungrazer Project because I love looking for comets. It’s really exciting to be the first to see comets get bright near the Sun after they’ve been traveling through space for thousands of years.”
      Most of the 5,000 comets discovered using SOHO have been found with the help of an international cadre of volunteer comet hunters – many with no formal scientific training – participating in the Sungrazer Project.
      “Prior to the launch of the SOHO mission and the Sungrazer Project, there were only a couple dozen sungrazing comets on record – that’s all we knew existed,” said Karl Battams, a space scientist at the U.S. Naval Research Lab in Washington, D.C., and the principal investigator for the Sungrazer Project. “The fact that we’ve finally reached this milestone – 5,000 comets – is just unbelievable to me.”
      SOHO’s 5,000th comet was discovered with the help of volunteers participating in the NASA-funded Sungrazer Project.
      Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center The vast number of comets discovered using SOHO has allowed scientists to learn more about sungrazing comets and groups of comets that orbit the Sun. Comets discovered by the Sungrazer Project have also helped scientists learn more about the Sun, by watching the comets plunge through our star’s atmosphere like small solar probes.
      “The statistics of 5,000 comets, and looking at their orbits and trajectories through space, is a super unique dataset – it’s really valuable science,” Battams said. “It’s a testament to the countless hours the project participants have put into this. We absolutely would never had reached this milestone if it wasn’t for what the project volunteers have done.”
      The Sungrazer Project is one of many opportunities that anyone can get involved with to help make discoveries with NASA during the Heliophysics Big Year, which extends through the end of 2024. Learn more about SOHO, the Sungrazer Project, and other NASA science projects you can participate in:
      NASA SOHO mission website ESA SOHO website The Sungrazer Project Why ESA and NASA’s SOHO Spacecraft Spots So Many Comets 4,000th Comet Discovered by ESA & NASA Solar Observatory NASA Citizen Science by Vanessa Thomas
      NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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      Details
      Last Updated Mar 27, 2024 Related Terms
      Citizen Science Comets Heliophysics Skywatching SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) The Solar System The Sun Explore More
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      The Sun erupted over the weekend, flinging electromagnetic radiation towards Earth, even illuminating skies with spectacular aurora borealis. For the first time, ESA’s unlikely space weather duo of SMOS and Swarm tracked the severe solar storm — which warped Earth’s magnetic field.
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    • By NASA
      5 min read
      NASA to Launch Sounding Rockets into Moon’s Shadow During Solar Eclipse
      NASA will launch three sounding rockets during the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024, to study how Earth’s upper atmosphere is affected when sunlight momentarily dims over a portion of the planet.
      The Atmospheric Perturbations around Eclipse Path (APEP) sounding rockets will launch from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia to study the disturbances in the ionosphere created when the Moon eclipses the Sun. The sounding rockets had been previously launched and successfully recovered from White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, during the October 2023 annular solar eclipse. They have been refurbished with new instrumentation and will be relaunched in April 2024. The mission is led by Aroh Barjatya, a professor of engineering physics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, where he directs the Space and Atmospheric Instrumentation Lab.
      This photo shows the three APEP sounding rockets and the support team after successful assembly. The team lead, Aroh Barjatya, is at the top center, standing next to the guardrails on the second floor. NASA/Berit Bland The sounding rockets will launch at three different times: 45 minutes before, during, and 45 minutes after the peak local eclipse. These intervals are important to collect data on how the Sun’s sudden disappearance affects the ionosphere, creating disturbances that have the potential to interfere with our communications.
      This conceptual animation is an example of what observers might expect to see during a total solar eclipse, like the one happening over the United States on April 8, 2024. NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio. The ionosphere is a region of Earth’s atmosphere that is between 55 to 310 miles (90 to 500 kilometers) above the ground. “It’s an electrified region that reflects and refracts radio signals, and also impacts satellite communications as the signals pass through,” said Barjatya. “Understanding the ionosphere and developing models to help us predict disturbances is crucial to making sure our increasingly communication-dependent world operates smoothly.”
      The ionosphere forms the boundary between Earth’s lower atmosphere – where we live and breathe – and the vacuum of space. It is made up of a sea of particles that become ionized, or electrically charged, from the Sun’s energy, or solar radiation. When night falls, the ionosphere thins out as previously ionized particles relax and recombine back into neutral particles. However, Earth’s terrestrial weather and space weather can impact these particles, making it a dynamic region and difficult to know what the ionosphere will be like at a given time. 
      An animation depicts changes in the ionosphere over a 24-hour period. The red and yellow swaths represent high-density ionized particles during the day. The purple dots represent neutral, relaxed particles at night. NASA/Krystofer Kim It’s often difficult to study short-term changes in the ionosphere during an eclipse with satellites because they may not be at the right place or time to cross the eclipse path. Since the exact date and times of the total solar eclipse are known, NASA can launch targeted sounding rockets to study the effects of the eclipse at the right time and at all altitudes of the ionosphere.
      As the eclipse shadow races through the atmosphere, it creates a rapid, localized sunset that triggers large-scale atmospheric waves and small-scale disturbances, or perturbations. These perturbations affect different radio communication frequencies. Gathering the data on these perturbations will help scientists validate and improve current models that help predict potential disturbances to our communications, especially high frequency communication. 
      The animation depicts the waves created by ionized particles during the 2017 total solar eclipse. MIT Haystack Observatory/Shun-rong Zhang. Zhang, S.-R., Erickson, P. J., Goncharenko, L. P., Coster, A. J., Rideout, W. & Vierinen, J. (2017). Ionospheric Bow Waves and Perturbations Induced by the 21 August 2017 Solar Eclipse. Geophysical Research Letters, 44(24), 12,067-12,073. https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL076054. The APEP rockets are expected to reach a maximum altitude of 260 miles (420 kilometers). Each rocket will measure charged and neutral particle density and surrounding electric and magnetic fields. “Each rocket will eject four secondary instruments the size of a two-liter soda bottle that also measure the same data points, so it’s similar to results from fifteen rockets, while only launching three,” explained Barjatya. Three secondary instruments on each rocket were built by Embry-Riddle, and the fourth one was built at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
      In addition to the rockets, several teams across the U.S. will also be taking measurements of the ionosphere by various means. A team of students from Embry-Riddle will deploy a series of high-altitude balloons. Co-investigators from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Haystack Observatory in Massachusetts, and the Air Force Research Laboratory in New Mexico, will operate a variety of ground-based radars taking measurements. Using this data, a team of scientists from Embry-Riddle and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory are refining existing models. Together, these various investigations will help provide the puzzle pieces needed to see the bigger picture of ionospheric dynamics.
      A sounding rocket is able to carry science instruments between 30 and 300 miles above Earth’s surface. These altitudes are typically too high for science balloons and too low for satellites to access safely, making sounding rockets the only platforms that can carry out direct measurements in these regions. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center When the APEP sounding rockets launched during the 2023 annular solar eclipse, scientists saw a sharp reduction in the density of charged particles as the annular eclipse shadow passed over the atmosphere. “We saw the perturbations capable of affecting radio communications in the second and third rockets, but not during the first rocket that was before peak local eclipse” said Barjatya. “We are super excited to relaunch them during the total eclipse, to see if the perturbations start at the same altitude and if their magnitude and scale remain the same.”
      The next total solar eclipse over the contiguous U.S. is not until 2044, so these experiments are a rare opportunity for scientists to collect crucial data.
      The APEP launches will be live streamed via NASA’s Wallops’ official YouTube page and featured in NASA’s official broadcast of the total solar eclipse. The public can also watch the launches in person from 1-4 p.m. at the NASA Wallops Flight Facility Visitor Center.
      By Desiree Apodaca
      NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
      Share








      Details
      Last Updated Mar 25, 2024 Related Terms
      2024 Solar Eclipse Eclipses Goddard Space Flight Center Heliophysics Heliophysics Division Heliophysics Research Program Ionosphere Science & Research Science Mission Directorate Skywatching Solar Eclipses Sounding Rockets Program Wallops Flight Facility Explore More
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