ESA announces new missions studying the Sun and dark energy
Baku, October 6 (AZERTAC). `The European Space Agency has approved two new missions to launch by decade`s end. The Solar Orbiter will examine the nature of solar wind, while Euclid aims to unlock the secret of dark energy, Deutsche Welle reports.
At a meeting in Paris on Tuesday, the European Space Agency approved two new space science missions to begin before the end of the decade.
The Solar Orbiter, set to launch in 2017, is designed to help scientists better understand how the Sun influences the Earth`s environment, and how solar wind - the constant stream of energy particles from the Sun - affects the solar system. The second project, a space telescope called Euclid, is slated for blast-off in 2019.
Euclid will be able to see cosmological objects 10 billion light-years away from Earth, and will particularly be designed to further the study of dark energy, the mysterious expansionary force that causes the universe`s rate of expansion to accelerate. The three American scientists involved in dark energy`s discovery were awarded the Nobel Prize on Tuesday.
These two missions are the first in the ESA`s Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 Plans, which outlines research priorities for the coming decade.
European astronomers say that these two missions will vastly improve knowledge of these types of stellar and cosmological phenomena.
"For Solar Orbiter, where I lead one of the ten instruments onboard, the mission will make huge leaps in our understanding of how the Sun makes the solar wind and how its 11 year sunspot cycle, which is actually a cycle in its magnetic field, actually works," wrote Tim Horbury, a physics professor at the Imperial College London, in an e-mail sent to Deutsche Welle.
"Solar Orbiter will do this by flying closer to the Sun then ever before, closer than Mercury, and taking pictures of the Sun`s surface and atmosphere at very high resolution. It will also measure the solar wind and magnetic field coming off the Sun," Horbury said.
"By going close, we can link together where the different bits of solar wind come from. Incredibly, we currently just don`t know where on the Sun about half of the solar wind is born."
Pekka Janhunen, a researcher at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, agreed, noting that scientists in his field say that little is known about how solar wind is created from the sun.
Other news in this section
