NASA IRIS Mission: X-Flare - Close-up of Sunspot - Video

NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) mission can only study small areas of the Sun's surface at a time.

This week’s mission planner pointed the probe at promising sunspot AR2158 just in time for an X1.6-class flare.

Searing plasma "lines" spark and shift at several hundred miles per hour during the flare.



Sun Unleashes Major Solar Flare at Earth.

A coronal mass ejection burst off the side of the sun on May 9, 2014. The giant sheet of solar material erupting was the first CME seen by NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS).

The field of view seen here is about five Earth's wide and about seven and a half Earth's tall.

IRIS Mission Underway on This Week @NASA

NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph or IRIS mission is underway. IRIS was air-launched on an Orbital Sciences Corporation Pegasus rocket 39,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean near Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

The NASA Small Explorer Mission will observe how solar material moves, gathers energy and heats up as it travels through a little-understood region in the sun's lower atmosphere.

Also, Atlantis Unveiled, 10,00th Near Earth Object, SLS Vertical Weld Center, Human Spaceflight Update, Spacewalk Prepares ISS for New Module, Accelerating ISS Science, A HUNCH for STEM, Rocket Week 2013 and more!

NASA IRIS Mission: Sun-Watching Probe Launched - Video

NASA IRIS, the  newest solar observatory launched into space late Thursday (June 27), beginning a two-year quest to probe some of the sun's biggest mysteries. An Orbital Sciences Corp. Pegasus XL rocket and the new solar telescope, called the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph satellite (IRIS), left California's Vandenberg Air Force Base underneath a specially modified aircraft at 9:30 p.m. EDT Thursday (6:30 p.m. local time; 0130 GMT Friday).

Nearly one hour later, at 10:27 p.m. EDT (7:27 p.m. local time), the plane dropped its payload 39,000 feet (11,900 meters) above the Pacific Ocean, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) northwest of Vandenberg.

After a five-second freefall, the Pegasus rocket roared to life and carried the sun-watching IRIS into Earth orbit.

"We're thrilled. We're very excited," NASA launch director Tim Dunn said just after the successful blastoff.

"We've gotten good data back. The solar arrays did begin to deploy and everything is proceeding right on track."

Scientists hope IRIS' observations help them better understand how energy and material move around the sun. They want to know, for example, why the outer atmosphere of the sun is more than 1,000 times hotter than the star's surface.

NASA IRIS Mission prepare for Launch

The fully integrated spacecraft and science instrument for NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) mission is seen in a clean room at the Lockheed Martin Space Systems Sunnyvale, Calif. facility. 

The solar arrays are deployed in the configuration they will assume when in orbit. IRIS is scheduled to launch on June 26, 2013.

Understanding the interface between the photosphere and corona remains a fundamental challenge in solar and heliospheric science. The IRIS mission opens a window of discovery into this crucial region by tracing the flow of energy and plasma through the chromosphere and transition region into the corona using spectrometry and imaging.

IRIS is designed to provide significant new information to increase our understanding of energy transport into the corona and solar wind and provide an archetype for all stellar atmospheres.

The unique instrument capabilities, coupled with state of the art 3-D modeling, will fill a large gap in our knowledge of this dynamic region of the solar atmosphere.

The mission will extend the scientific output of existing heliophysics spacecraft that follow the effects of energy release processes from the sun to Earth.

Image Credit: NASA/Lockheed Martin

NASA IRIS Mission: Examining the Sun's Corona - Video

At the end of June 2013, NASA will launch its newest mission to watch the sun: the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS).

IRIS will show the lowest levels of the sun's atmosphere, the interface region, in more detail than has even been observed before.

This will help scientists understand how the energy dancing through this area helps power the sun's million-degree upper atmosphere, the corona, as well as how this energy powers the solar wind constantly streaming off the sun to fill the entire solar system.

Data visualizations courtesy of Mats Carlsson and Viggo Hansteen, University of Oslo, Norway