NASA’s SunRISE (Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment) mission will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, shifting from its originally planned ride aboard a United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur vehicle. NASA said it will share updated launch timing soon.
The heliophysics mission will fly as a rideshare sponsored by the US Space Force’s Space Systems Command.
The mission’s six toaster-oven-size small satellites, or SmallSats, will operate as one giant radio dish positioned slightly above geosynchronous orbit, at an altitude of about 35,000km, to track radio bursts originating within the sun’s atmosphere, or corona.
These bursts are generated by accelerated particles leaving the sun, and the resulting radio waves arrive at Earth before the associated solar energetic particles. In extreme cases, solar particle events can damage satellites and affect astronauts; tracking the radio waves they generate is intended to improve prediction and mitigation efforts.
The SmallSats have completed assembly and testing at Utah State University’s Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, where they will be stored until the launch period is confirmed.
SunRISE is a Mission of Opportunity under the Heliophysics Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, part of the Explorers Program managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The mission’s science investigation is led by the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, which also provides the science operations center; the project is managed by JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, which provides the mission operations center.
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