After a long time, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is now all set to launch its new rocket into space, the primary objective of the rocket is to take the pictures of Sun, and its conditions. And this rocket will wave its way into space cutting 320 kilometers straight upwards.
This rocket will be launched on Friday and Scientists claim that it is capable of taking 1500 images in just five minutes. The rocket is named as ‘Sounding Rocket’ after the word ‘to sound’ which means to take measurements is actually a nautical term.
According to the sources, this ‘Rapid Acquisition Imaging Spectrograph Experiment’ shortly called as ‘NASA-funded RAISE mission’ is designed to scrutinise split-second changes occurring near the Sun’s active regions — areas of intense, complex magnetic activity that can give rise to solar flares, which eject energy and solar material out into space.
The launch window opens at 2:25 p.m. EDT at the White Sands Missile Range near Las Cruces, New Mexico, as it is well known as always, the precise timing of the launch depends on weather conditions, and coordinated timing with other space observatories, said NASA.
Earlier too, several such kinds of missions were conducted to study the Sun, such as NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, and the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, or STEREO — but certain areas of the sun demand especially ‘high-cade’ which precisely will be attained by RAISE.
Don Hassler, the principal investigator for the RAISE mission at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado has said, “Dynamic processes happen on all timescales.”
“With RAISE, we’ll read out an image every two-tenths of a second, so we can study very fast processes and changes on the Sun. That’s around five to 10 times faster than comparable instruments on other sounding rocket or satellite missions,” Hassler added.
This images which will be attained through RAISE will be used to create a data product called a spectrogram, which separates light from the Sun into all its different wavelength components. By looking at the intensity of light at each wavelength, scientists can assess how solar material and energy moves around the Sun, and how that movement evolves into massive solar eruptions in the space.
“RAISE is pushing the limits of high-cadence observations, and doing so is challenging, but that’s exactly what the NASA sounding rocket program is for,” Hassler concluded.
Meanwhile, coming to the path of the flight, this rocket is short-lived and has a parabolic trajectory. Most sounding rocket flights last for 15 to 20 minutes, and just five to six of those minutes are spent making observations from above the atmosphere, observations that can only be done in space.
Similarly, in RAISE’s case, the extreme ultraviolet light the instruments observe cannot penetrate Earth’s atmosphere. After the flight, the payload parachutes to the ground, where it can be recovered for use again in next missions.