January 3, 2025
3 read me
Heliophysics will shine in 2025
Solar science and its effects on the solar system is a broad discipline that looks forward to a very exciting 2025.
The Sun sends out a constant stream of charged particles called the solar wind, which eventually passes through all the planets up to three times the distance to Pluto before being intercepted by the interstellar medium. This forms a giant bubble around the sun and its planets, known as the heliosphere.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab
If our solar system lost a few moons or a planet, the difference would be hard to notice, but it will lose the sun, and everything changes. Despite its role as the hub of the neighborhood, scientists still have many questions about how the sun works and how it affects our daily lives on Earth and in space. And 2025 is poised to play a key role in getting answers.
Three factors are combining to make the coming year particularly exciting for the discipline known as heliophysics: the natural cycle of the sun’s activity, a fleet of spacecraft, and the release of a blueprint designed to drive the next decade of work in the field.
Right now the sun is in the maximum phase of its 11-year activity cycle, which scientists expect to last perhaps another year or more before its activity begins to wane. And while the current Solar Cycle 25 isn’t breaking any records, it has created many. solar flares and other spectacular eruptions that scientists have been able to track with the latest tools. These observers include the largest solar telescope ever built and the closest spacecraft to the sun in history.
About supporting science journalism
If you like this article, please consider supporting our award-winning journalism subscribe. By purchasing a subscription, you’re helping to ensure a future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas that shape our world.
And this year those innovative projects will get many new companies; NASA alone hopes to launch a half-dozen missions to study the sun and its various ways of forming the solar system. These include the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, or IMAP, designed to help scientists map. the outer limits of the sun’s sphere of influence; Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers or ESCAPADE, a pair of spacecraft that will orbit Mars to study the Red Planet’s experience of space weather; and the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere, or PUNCH, mission, which combines four small Earth-orbiting satellites to study. the sun’s outer atmosphere or corona.
In addition, US heliophysicists have a new so-called decade reportThe plan for the next decade, released last month, outlines the national science priorities that federal agencies will begin implementing over the next decade. “I’m really excited,” says Joe Westlake, a heliophysicist and director of the Heliophysics Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
“These decades are aspirational visions of our future,” he says. “There are some really good things in this.”
For future space shuttle missions, the report recommends that NASA pursue two major projects. A mission would consist of a total of 26 spacecraft: two would be located above the poles of our planet in circular orbits and would take images of the aurora and the Earth’s magnetic field from afar. The rest would be placed in more elliptical orbits passing through the geomagnetic field, where they would gather local observations of its strength and the surrounding plasma. “Twenty spacecraft and the ability to bring them all together at the same time, to look down, look up and collect observations, is going to be a tremendous data set tool for us,” says Nicki Rayl, Deputy Director of Heliophysics. the division “I think it’s going to be disruptive.”
The second major project would be a spacecraft designed to fly past the sun’s poles several times during the entire 11-year cycle of solar activity. A current NASA mission, Parker Solar Probeit is sinking closer and closer to the sun’s surface, but it has stopped observing the sun in its equatorial region. Meanwhile, an ongoing European Space Agency mission called Solar Orbiter provided only partial views of the solar poles. As a result, the poles of our star remain a mysterious region, even if they play a crucial role the sun’s magnetic field. “Going to the poles of the sun is difficult, and it’s a tricky environment,” Rayle says. “That’s the next uncharted territory.”
On Earth, these ambitious missions would be augmented by the Next Generation Global Oscillations Network Group (ngGONG), which builds on the GONG group of observatories that began operations in 1995. These observatories are spread around the world to keep the sun in their eyes. during the day, and they use a technique called helioseismology to study the solar interior observing the waves that pass through it, just as geologists use seismology to study the Earth’s interior.
“Some of these bold and incredible goals in the decade are helping us leap into the unknown and do the science of discovery,” Rayle says. In the meantime, he said, the missions that will be launched next year will provide more and more information and new questions about the sun. “I’m glad we’re going to be in a position to collect data,” he says. “Time to go.”
