NET Launch Date – August 23, 2011
Phase C – Design & Development
RBSP is being designed to help us understand the Sun’s influence on Earth and Near-Earth space by studying the Earth’s radiation belts on various scales of space and time.
The instruments on NASA’s Living With a Star Program’s (LWS) Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP) mission will provide the measurements needed to characterize and quantify the plasma processes that produce very energetic ions and relativistic electrons. The RBSP mission is part of the broader LWS program whose missions were conceived to explore fundamental processes that operate throughout the solar system and in particular those that generate hazardous space weather effects in the vicinity of Earth and phenomena that could impact solar system exploration. RBSP instruments will measure the properties of charged particles that comprise the Earth’s radiation belts, the plasma waves that interact with them, the large-scale electric fields that transport them, and the particle-guiding magnetic field.
The two RBSP spacecraft will have nearly identical eccentric orbits. The orbits cover the entire radiation belt region and the two spacecraft lap each other several times over the course of the mission. The RBSP in situ measurements discriminate between spatial and temporal effects, and compare the effects of various proposed mechanisms for charged particle acceleration and loss.
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Launch Dates – December 2012/January 2013 (Antarctic); December 2013/January 2014 (Antarctic)
Phase C – Design & Development
BARREL is a balloon-based Mission of Opportunity to augment the measurements of NASA’s RBSP spacecraft. BARREL seeks to measure the precipitation of relativistic electrons from the radiation belts during 2 multi-balloon campaigns, operated in the southern hemispheres (option for 3rd northern hemisphere campaign). During each campaign, 5-8 long-duration balloons would be aloft simultaneously over a one-month period to provide measurements of the spatial extent of the relativistic electron precipitation and to allow an estimate of the total electron loss from the radiation belts. Observations are planned for when the balloon-array will be conjugate with the RBSP spacecraft, such that direct comparison is possible between one another.
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Instruments on DSX Mission
Launch Date – October 2012
Phase D – Design & Development
The Space Environment Testbeds (SET) Project performs flight and ground investigations to address the Living With a Star (LWS) Program goal of understanding how the Sun/Earth interactions affect humanity. The SET Project is the element of the LWS Program that characterizes the space environment and its impact on hardware performance in space.
The project goal for SET is to improve the engineering approach to accommodation and/or mitigation of the effects of solar variability on spacecraft design and operations.
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Launch Date – July 30, 2018
Phase A – Preliminary Analysis
Solar Probe Plus will be an extraordinary and historic mission, exploring what is arguably the last region of the solar system to be visited by a spacecraft, the Sun’s outer atmosphere or corona as it extends out into space. Approaching as close as 9.5 solar radii* (8.5 solar radii above the Sun’s surface), Solar Probe Plus will repeatedly sample the near-Sun environment, revolutionizing our knowledge and understanding of coronal heating and of the origin and evolution of the solar wind and answering critical questions in heliophysics that have been ranked as top priorities for decades. Moreover, by making direct, in-situ measurements of the region where some of the most hazardous solar energetic particles are energized, Solar Probe+ will make a fundamental contribution to our ability to characterize and forecast the radiation environment in which future space explorers will work and live.
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Launch Date – 2017
Phase A – Preliminary Analysis
Solar Orbiter is a European Space Agency (ESA) mission to study the Sun from a distance closer than any spacecraft previously has, and will provide images and measurements in unprecedented resolution and detail. Early in 2007, ESA and NASA combined ESA’s Solar Orbiter and NASA’s Solar Sentinels into a single joint collaboration or program named Heliophysical Explorers (HELEX).
Solar Orbiter will provide close-up views of the Sun’s polar regions and its back-side and will tune its orbit to the direction of the Sun’s rotation as to allow the spacecraft to observe one specific area for much longer than currently possible. This will provide better insight on the evolution of sunspots, active regions, coronal holes and other solar features and phenomenon.
Solar Orbiter is a three-axis stabilized spacecraft equipped with instruments for both in-situ measurements and remote-sensing observations. It will be placed into an elliptical orbit about the Sun with perihelia ranging from 0.23 to 0.38 AU and aphelia from 0.73 to 0.88 AU. After an in-ecliptic phase of perihelion passes where it is nearly corotating with the Sun, Solar Orbiter will use multiple Venus gravity assist maneuvers to move the inclination of its orbit to progressively higher heliolatitudes, reaching ~34.2° by the end of its extended mission.
HELEX combines the capabilities of ESA’s Solar Orbiter (near-Sun in-situ plus remote-sensing observations from a partially co-rotating platform whose orbital inclination gradually rises from nearecliptic to heliographic midlatitudes) with those of NASA’s Sentinels (in-situ observations from multiple platforms arrayed at varying radial distances and azimuthal locations in the near-ecliptic plane) to investigate, characterize, and understand the Sun’s influence on the environment of the inner solar system.
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Launched February 11, 2010
Phase – Operating
The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) is the first mission and crown jewel in a fleet of NASA missions to study our sun. The mission is the cornerstone of a NASA science program called Living With a Star (LWS). The goal of the LWS Program is to develop the scientific understanding necessary to address those aspects of the sun and solar system that directly affect life and society.
SDO will study how solar activity is created and how space weather results from that activity. Measurements of the sun’s interior, magnetic field, the hot plasma of the solar corona, and the irradiance will help meet the objectives of the SDO mission.
SDO is the most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the sun and its dynamic behavior. It will provide better quality, more comprehensive science data faster than any NASA spacecraft currently studying the sun and its processes. SDO will unlock the processes inside the sun, on the sun’s surface, and in its corona that result in solar variability. This variability, when experienced on Earth, is called space weather.
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NET = No Earlier Than
