A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base this Tuesday, delivering a suite of missions designed to probe one of the most consequential forces in the solar system: the Sun. At the center of it all is heliophysics — a newly minted entry in Merriam-Webster — the science of the sun and how it shapes and affects our galaxy.
The Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites, or TRACERS, will launch from right here in Santa Barbara County to study how Earth’s magnetic field interacts with solar wind — charged particles that stream off of the Sun. Think of it like this: Earth’s magnetosphere is our planet’s invisible force field, shielding us from radiation, but sometimes that barrier gets poked — hard — and we end up with northern lights, GPS glitches, or worse, a regional power outage.
“This mission is critical to understanding — and eventually predicting — how energy from the Sun impacts both Earth and the systems we depend on,” said Joe Westlake, director of NASA’s Heliophysics Division. “We want to keep our way of life safe and enable safe space exploration.”
David Miles, the University of Iowa researcher leading the mission, put TRACERS’ goal another way: “We’re trying to understand how the coupling between the solar wind and Earth’s magnetic systems changes in space and in time.”…