Spaceships launching to explore mysterious radio waves from Sun

By Dean Murray via SWNS

Scientists are launching spaceships to investigate mysterious radio waves being beamed from the Sun .

The so-called CubeSat Radio Interferometry Experiment , or CURIE, sees two craft scheduled to take off on Tuesday (9 July).

They are tasked with homing on the transmissions to work out what is responsible.

Scientists first noticed the phenomenon decades ago, and over the years determined the radio waves come from solar flares and giant eruptions on the Sun called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs.

CMEs are a key driver of space weather that can impact satellite communications and technology at Earth, but no one knows where the radio waves originate within a CME.

NASA says: "The CURIE mission aims to advance our understanding using a technique called low-frequency radio interferometry, which has never been used in space before. This technique relies on CURIE’s two independent spacecraft — together no bigger than a shoebox — that will orbit Earth about two miles apart.

"This separation allows CURIE’s instruments to measure tiny differences in the arrival time of radio waves, which enables them to determine exactly where the radio waves came from."

“This is a very ambitious and very exciting mission,” said Principal Investigator David Sundkvist, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. “This is the first time that someone is ever flying a radio interferometer in space in a controlled way, and so it’s a pathfinder for radio astronomy in general.”

The spacecraft, designed by a team from UC Berkeley , will measure radio waves ranging 0.1 to 19 megahertz to pinpoint the radio waves’ solar origin. These wavelengths are blocked by Earth’s upper atmosphere, so this research can only be done from space.

CURIE will launch aboard an ESA (European Space Agency) Ariane 6 rocket from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana. The rocket will take CURIE to 360 miles above Earth’s surface, where it can get a clear view of the Sun’s radio waves.

Once in its circular orbit, the two adjoined CURIE spacecraft will establish communication with ground stations before orienting and separating. When the separated satellites are in formation, their dual eight-foot antennas will deploy and start collecting data.

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