NASA Heading Straight for Sun

The sun is a daily presence in our lives, pouring down heat and energy that forms the rock bottom of the food chain. NASA wants better information on how the sun creates and emanates its energy, and will find out with the forthcoming IRIS mission.

NASA launches a mission June 26 aimed at collecting the most data ever on the interface region of the sun's atmosphere. The United States and Norway are partners in the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) mission.

Energy and heat course through the interface region as different zones of temperature and density heat the upper layer of the atmosphere, the corona, to temperatures as much as 1,000 times hotter than the sun's surface. Energy that escapes the interface region fuels the solar wind, the constant stream of particles that flows through the entire solar system. The sun's ultraviolet emissions also emanate from the interface.

"IRIS will extend our observations of the sun to a region that has historically been difficult to study," said Joe Davila, an IRIS project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Better understanding of the sun’s atmosphere allows greater insight into solar events that can have a huge impact on systems on Earth. Explosions in the corona can send radiation and solar particles toward Earth, interfering with satellites, causing power-grid failures and disrupting GPS and communication services.