NASA has approved two heliophysics missions to explore the Sun and the system that drives space weather near Earth. Together, NASA’s contribution to the Extreme Ultraviolet High-Throughput Spectroscopic Telescope Epsilon Mission, or EUVST, and the Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer, or EZIE, will help us understand the Sun and Earth as an interconnected system.

Understanding the physics that drive the solar wind and solar explosions – including solar flares and coronal mass ejections – could one day help scientists predict these events, which can impact human technology and explorers in space.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) leads the Extreme Ultraviolet High-Throughput Spectroscopic Telescope (EUVST) Epsilon Mission (Solar-C EUVST Mission), along with other international partners. Targeted for launch in 2026, EUVST is a solar telescope that will study how the solar atmosphere releases solar wind and drives eruptions of solar material. These phenomena propagate out from the Sun and influence the space radiation environment throughout the solar system. NASA’s hardware contributions to the mission include an intensified UV detector and support electronics, spectrograph components, a guide telescope, software, and a slit-jaw imaging system to provide context for the spectrographic measurement. The budget for NASA contributions to EUVST is $55 million. The principal investigator for the NASA contribution to EUVST is Harry Warren at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington.

The Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer (EZIE) will study electric currents in Earth’s atmosphere linking aurora to the Earth’s magnetosphere – one piece of Earth’s complicated space weather system, which responds to solar activity and other factors. The Auroral Electrojet (AE) index is a common measure of geomagnetic activity levels, even though the details of the structure of these currents is not understood. EZIE will launch no earlier than June 2024. The total budget for the EZIE mission is $53.3 million. The principal investigator for the mission is Jeng-Hwa (Sam) Yee at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

“We are very pleased to add these new missions to the growing fleet of satellites that are studying our Sun-Earth system using an amazing array of unprecedented observational tools,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “In addition to my enthusiasm at selecting a pioneering multi-point observatory focused on the auroral electrojets, I am particularly excited to follow up the success of the Yohkoh and Hinode solar science missions with another international collaboration with JAXA and other European partners on EUVST.”

The EUVST mission addresses the recommendations of a July 2017 final report delivered by the multi-agency Next Generation Solar Physics Mission Science Objectives Team. EUVST will take comprehensive UV spectroscopy measurements of the solar atmosphere at the highest level of detail to date, which will allow scientists to tease out how different magnetic and plasma processes drive coronal heating and energy release.

“We’re excited to work with our international partners to answer some of our fundamental questions about the Sun,” said Nicky Fox, Heliophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “EUVST’s observations will complement our current missions to give us new insight into our star.”

EZIE is an investigation comprising a trio of CubeSats that will study the source of and changes in the auroral electrojet, an electric current circling through Earth’s atmosphere around 60-90 miles above the surface and extending into the Earth’s magnetosphere. The interaction of the magnetosphere and the solar wind compresses the Sun-facing side of the magnetosphere and drags out the night-time side of the magnetosphere into what is called a “magnetotail.” Auroral electrojets are generated by changes in the structure of the magnetotail. The same space weather phenomena that power the beautiful aurora can cause interference with radio and communication signals and utility grids on Earth’s surface, and damage to spacecraft in orbit.

“With these new missions, we’re expanding how we study the Sun, space, and Earth as an interconnected system,” said Peg Luce, deputy director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “EZIE’s use of instrument technology proven on Earth science CubeSat missions is just one example of how science and technology development at NASA go hand in hand across disciplines.”

Funding for these missions of opportunity comes from the Heliophysics Explorers Program, managed by the Explorers Program Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

For more information about NASA’s Heliophysics Division, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/sunearth

For more information about Heliophysics missions of opportunity, visit:

https://explorers.gsfc.nasa.gov/missions.html

photo courtesy NASA
 

World’s smallest bot takes flight.

Insect-sized robots have long held promise in the minds of sci-fi nerds.

They could poke through treacherous rubble in search-and-rescue missions, discreetly snoop on the guilty and innocent alike, and sometimes, just maybe, form into giant swarms that block out the sun and do the bidding of larger, less agile, robotic overlords.

“As far as we can tell, this is the world’s smallest flying robot,” Kevin Ma, a graduate student at Harvard’s Wyss Institute and a member of the robot team, told NBC News.

“It’s hard to argue that anything is more agile than a housefly — I think anyone who’s tried to swat one would agree,” said Rob Wood of the Wyss Institute at Harvard, and the lead researcher on the project. “This is the first controlled flight of an insect-scaled robot.”

Two mechanical muscles on the robots control the flapping and twisting motion of the wings. Previous versions of this robot would crash soon after they took off, but the most recent model has motion capture sensors and guiding algorithms that corrects its movements as it takes off.

In its current form, it’s mostly suited to help physicists and biologists study the dynamics of motion in a controlled environment. Woods estimates we’re still about 30 years away from being able to pack in the power and sensors required for a truly environment-aware robo-bug.

“This proof of concept design … gives us hope that we can develop insect-scale flying robots some day,” Vijay Kumar, professor at University of Pennsylvania who has worked with swarms of tiny quadracopters, wrote to NBC News in an email.

While bug-sized robots working individually or in giant swarms could be helpful — to serve as surrogate bees in pollination efforts, or sniff out dangerous chemicals in the atmosphere — they’d also make stealthy snoopers. This makes them a favorite target of privacy activists who frequently bring up stealthy miniature bots in discussions about technology and privacy.

“Presumably at some point you could have one the size of a mosquito that has a battery that operates for weeks and you could have the mosquito following you around and not be aware of it,” Al Franken, D-Minn, said. “God help us if an adolescent boy gets hold of one of these.”

It’s not just adolescent boys who dream of robo-insects. Sci-fi movies are full of them. There are the spidery critters that chase Tom Cruise after his eyeball transplant in “Minority Report,” the wriggling “bug” that invades the belly button of Keanu Reeves in “The Matrix,” and the wire-tapped cockroach that gets smushed a moment too late, in the cheesy Bruce Willis favorite, “The Fifth Element.”

But battery power and sensors pose gigantic hurdles for a pea-sized robot. For one, “You have to build everything from scratch,” Wood says, as motors and actuators aren’t manufactured in their size. The engineering also gets complicated. “When you scale things down like that things flex differently and experience forces that the material reacts to differently,” said Rick Cory, a roboticist at Disney Research.

For now, the robotic fly is powered and guided by batteries and sensors that aren’t built into its body. Instead, they are tethered to control and power systems by fine copper wire. While Wood’s group is developing a sturdy body that’ll stay in the air, collaborators around the country are busy shrinking sensors. Still others are working on ways to network them for the day when they will interact as a swarm. “It’s roughly broken down into: body, brain and colony,” Wood says.

And they’re toiling towards the same goal. When the “brains” of the bot are small enough and powerful enough to be hoisted onto a tiny robot frame, Woods and his team hope to have a ready, steady, unswattable robo-fly on their hands.