NASA-Funded Mission To Study the Sun's Energy

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NASA-Funded Mission To Study the Sun's Energy

On July 14, 2014, a sounding rocket will be ready to launch from White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico a little before noon local time. Soaring up to 180 miles into Earth’s atmosphere, past the layers that can block much of the sun's high energy light, the Degradation Free Spectrometers experiment will have six minutes to observe the extreme ultraviolet and soft x-rays streaming from the sun, in order to measure the sun's total energy output, known as irradiance, in these short wavelengths.

The total solar irradiance, and to an even greater degree, irradiance at high energy wavelengths is known to change over time in conjunction with the sun's approximately-11-year solar cycle. How it changes over longer periods of time, however, is less certain – but fairly important if we're going to understand how solar variability affects Earth’s space environment.

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