NASA approves two new missions to study solar atmosphere, Earth’s aurora

The EUVST Epsilon Mission is led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) along with other international partners and is targeted for launch in 2026. The solar telescope will study how the solar atmosphere releases solar wind and drives eruptions of solar material.

NASA has approved two new heliophysics missions to explore the Sun and Earth's complicated space weather system, the US space agency said on Wednesday.

The two missions- Extreme Ultraviolet High-Throughput Spectroscopic Telescope (EUVST) Epsilon Mission and the Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer (EZIE) will help the agency understand the Sun, space, and Earth as an interconnected system.

"With these new missions, we're expanding how we study the Sun, space, and Earth as an interconnected system. 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," said Peg Luce, deputy director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The EUVST Epsilon Mission is led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) along with other international partners and is targeted for launch in 2026. The solar telescope will study how the solar atmosphere releases solar wind and drives eruptions of solar material.

For this mission, NASA will contribute 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.

On the other hand, the EZIE mission 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 mission addresses the recommendations of a July 2017 final report delivered by the multi-agency Next Generation Solar Physics Mission Science Objectives Team.

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.