NASA launches IRIS solar mission to research space weather

NASA launched a solar telescope on Thursday that scientists hope will be able to unlock the secrets of how material gathers, moves and heats up as it travels through the Sun's lower atmosphere.

 

Scientists say that better understanding of this part of the solar atmosphere, which sits below the corona, could help explain and model phenomena like the ejection of solar material -- something that can cause damage to electronic circuits, power distribution networks and communications systems on Earth when it gets large enough.

 

The Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) was launched from a Pegasus rocket that was dropped from the belly of an L-1011 TriStar aircraft flying above the Pacific Ocean, about 150 kilometers off the central coast of California.

 

The aircraft departed Vandenberg Airforce Base in southern California and dropped the rocket carrying the IRIS spacecraft at 7:27pm local time (2:36am GMT Friday). All systems appeared to be performing normally in the first few minutes after launch.

 

IRIS will focus on two parts of the lower solar atmosphere that exhibit an unusual effect: temperatures in the region are believed to be around 6,000 Kelvin near the Sun's surface and heat up to around a million Kelvin at the top of the region. That's different to our conventional experience with heat sources, where temperatures rise as the source is approached.

 

Tracking the movement of material into the upper atmosphere could help model solar eruptions and coronal mass ejections that can cause damage on Earth.

 

"What is this interface region? We don't know," said Alan Title, IRIS principal investigation at Lockheed Martin. "The instruments that looked at this region in the past have had about 20 times poorer resolution spatially and about 20 times poorer resolution spectrally. Basically, we've been looking at things that happened so fast, that data taken as slowly as previous instruments have done hasn't given us any information."

 

"But even more fundamentally, there's not been a push to look at this region because the atomic physics in this region is very, very, very complicated," he said. It's only been in the last decade that computer models scientists hope can accurately model the Sun's lower atmosphere have even become available, he said.

 

Those simulations have required NASA's Pleiades supercomputer at its Ames Research Center, in Mountain View. Pleiades, manufactured by SGI and based around Intel Xeon processors, was ranked as the 19th most powerful computer in the world on the June 2013 Top 500 list of supercomputers. When it debuted on the list in June 2011 it was the 7th most powerful computer globally.

 

As the world's climate changes and ever more sensitive electronics is deployed, study of the effects of the Sun on Earth are becoming more pressing.

 

A recent study by Lloyd's of London said between 20 million and 40 million people in the U.S. are at risk of being without power for between two weeks and two years should a violent solar storm hit. The country is particularly at risk because of its aging power grid.

 

Power outages were much on the mind of the NASA team this week. IRIS was originally meant to be launched on Wednesday evening, but was delayed by a day because of a significant power outage at Vandenberg Airforce Base earlier in the week.

 

The irony of the delay wasn't lost on Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, which will be controlling the satellite and crunching a lot of the data it produces.

 

"We believe that some, maybe a lot of power outages, actually have a lot to do with solar activity," he said. "So the better we can understand the physics going on, the better we can understand the activity, the better we can potentially predict and mitigate these problems."

 

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NIH Takes Another Step Toward Retirement Of Research Chimps

Chimpanzees play at Chimp Haven, a retirement home for former research animals, in Keithville, La.

The National Institutes of Health says it will retire hundreds of chimpanzees that the agency had been using for research. Animal rights activists see the move as a big step towards ending the use of chimps in research, but it will be awhile before any of the research chimps find their way into retirement homes.

Right now, the NIH has some 360 chimps available to researchers. The vast majority of the animals are used in studies of things like genetics and behavior. But in recent years, the scientific community has begun to feel even these studies are unnecessary.

In 2011, the Institute of Medicine issued a report recommending that the vast majority of government chimps be retired. In January, an NIH working group agreed and issued specific recommendations on what to do with NIH's chimpanzees.

And earlier this month the Fish and Wildlife Service proposed designating all chimps, including lab chimps, as endangered. That would raise still another barrier to using them in research.

"Chimpanzees are very special animals," says Francis Collins, director of the NIH. "We believe they deserve special consideration as special creatures."

Collins says that the NIH will largely follow the plan issued by its internal working group. It will retire some 310 chimps to designated sanctuaries, leaving as many as 50 in labs and available for new research proposals.

The 50 or so will not necessarily stay in research forever. "We will revisit the decision about the need for those 50 in a small colony five years from now," Collins says.

The retired chimps will live out their lives in an environment similar to those in the wild. They will be in social groups of at least seven, and live inside enclosures where they can climb and forage for food. But the NIH won't follow a recommendation that each chimp be given 1,000 square feet of living space. Collins says: "We did not feel that there was adequate scientific evidence at present" to support that requirement. The cost involved with providing so much space was also an issue, he says.

Retirement won't come right away, however. Many chimps are still in research projects that will be allowed to run to completion in the next year or two. And the NIH has to work with Congress to change legislation regulating chimp retirement.

At present, the law caps the money the agency can spend on retirement at $30 million. NIH is expected to hit that limit soon, says Kathy Hudson deputy director for outreach and policy. The agency must also find additional space in sanctuaries for the chimps. That could involve expanding existing sanctuaries. But it could also mean recategorizing some laboratories as sanctuaries. "The [research] facilities are quite nice," Hudson says.

All of this is expected to take a few years, according to Collins.

Kathleen Conlee, the Humane Society's vice president for animal research, says that today's announcement is a big step in the right direction. "This is a moment we've all been waiting for," she says.

But, she says, more needs to be done. Conlee would like the NIH to reconsider the space requirements of its chimpanzees, and she bristles at the idea of turning labs into sanctuaries. "It's the culture of care," she says.

Above all, she says, she'd like to see the last 50 or so chimps designated to join their brethren. "I think we're moving in absolutely the right direction and we're going to keep pressing until the day when every government-owned chimpanzee is in a sanctuary," she says.