Local scientists have begun the final countdown on their high-tech, soup can-sized instrument that’s set to blast off in a Japanese rocket to study space weather.
University of Calgary scientists spent the last year designing and building the instrument, called a thermal suprathermal analyzer.
The $500,000 project is Canada’s contribution to an international effort to study the solar wind and intense solar radiation that sometimes wreaks havoc on electrical power grids and communications satellites.
“The goal is to understand how space weather operates and how these kinds of processes could affect the overall space weather,” says U of C physics and astronomy professor Andrew Yau, the lead investigator in the project.
The research could eventually lead to a better way of predicting the arrival and potential effects of solar storms on Earth, helping prevent damage to power grids and other facilities, Yau says.
Alberta has a particular interest in the research, because the solar storms, by inducing electrical currents on Earth, speed up corrosion in oil and gas pipelines.
The Canadian Space Agency contributed about $500,000 to the U of C-led project, as part of the agency’s research into the environment in space.
Canada, which has more of the solar aurora over its territory than any other country, “has a really important role to play here,” says Glen Campbell, project engineer in the national space science program.
“The information that we get from this instrument is so important to the Japanese that they agreed to fly us for free.”
The cylindrical package weighs only 3.3 kilograms, including a sensor and a mechanism to deploy it in space.
“It reminds me a lot of my favourite beer stein at home,” Lau jokes.
The package will fly in a Japanese-built sounding rocket, to be launched from a site in the Svalbard archipelago in northern Norway. The launch window begins Saturday, Nov. 25 and continues to Dec. 10.
When the rocket reaches a height of about 1,000 kilometres, the instrument will be released into a region where the solar wind penetrates the ionosphere, or Earth’s upper atmosphere.
This is the region where particles carried by the solar wind slam into Earth’s magnetic field, becoming highly charged and capable of inducing large currents in electric transmission lines.
A solar storm blacked out the province of Quebec for eight hours in 1989, for example.
“Our instrument is designed specifically not only to detect such particles, but also to identify their chemical composition as well as their velocity,” Yau says. “So we know exactly where they came from and exactly where they’re going.”
The instrument will transmit a wealth of data before falling harmlessly back to Earth.
Web Watch:
/www.phys.ucalgary. ca/satellites/html/tsa.html
