The High Resolution Coronal Imager, or Hi-C, launches aboard a Black Brant IX sounding rocket on April 17 at the Poker Flat Research Range in Fairbanks, Alaska. Credit: NASA/Lee Wingfield
OURThe Hi-C Flare mission, using innovative technology and a new algorithm to predict the behavior of solar flares, successfully launched a rocket to capture detailed solar images. This mission marks a significant advance in the study of solar phenomena, involving several instruments and collaboration between several research institutes.
After months of preparation and years since its last flight, the upgraded High Resolution Coronal Imager Flare mission – Hi-C Flare for short – lifted off for an unprecedented view of the solar flare.
The low-noise cameras — built at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama — are part of a suite of state-of-the-art instruments on the Black Brant IX sonic rocket launched April 17 from the Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska. Using the new technology, the researchers hoped to study the extreme energies involved in solar flares. The Hi-C Flare experimental mission was led by Marshall.
Technology launch and testing
“This is a pioneering campaign,” said Sabrina Savage, Marshall’s principal investigator for Hi-C Flare. “Launching sounding rockets to observe the Sun to test new technologies optimized for observing flares was not even an option until now. »
This was the third iteration of the Hi-C instrument to fly, but its first flight with onboard instruments including COOL-AID (Coronal OverLapagram), CAPRI-SUN (High Cadence Low Energy X-ray Detector with Integrated Field of View of Full of the sun) and SSAXI (Swift Solar Activity X-ray imager). After a month of payload integration and testing in White Sands, New Mexico, investigators completed final integration of the launch site at the Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska.
Challenges and successes of the launch campaign
Each morning during the two-week launch window, the team spent roughly five hours preparing the experiment for launch, followed by up to four hours of solar data tracking for a C5 or larger flare with a duration longer than the rocket’s time. flight. The launch finally took place on the penultimate day of the campaign window.
“The Sun has been remarkably quiet throughout the campaign despite many active regions,” Savage said. “Both teams were starting to get nervous that we wouldn’t be able to launch, but we finally got a nice, long-lasting M-class rocket right before the window closed. »
Rocket flight and data collection
The Hi-C Flare mission launched at 2:14 p.m., just one minute after the University of Minnesota’s FOXSI-4 (Focusing Optics X-ray Solar Imager) mission. Once airborne, the Hi-C Flare rocket’s sensors pointed the cameras at the Sun and stabilized the instruments. Then the shutter door opened to allow the cameras to collect about five minutes of data before the door closed and the rocket fell back to Earth.
The rocket crashed into the Alaskan tundra, where it remained until conditions were safe enough for the team to retrieve it and begin processing the collected data.
“For tundra launches, we have to wait a few days for the instrument to come back to us and then dry out enough to turn on,” Savage said. “It’s been an anxious few days, but the data is beautiful and worth the wait.”
Innovations and data processingInnovations and data processing
The researchers weren’t just testing new technologies. They also used a new algorithm to predict the behavior of the solar flare, which allowed them to launch the rocket at the ideal time.
“Filming a flare in action is really difficult because you can’t predict it,” said Genevieve Vigil, technical and camera manager for Hi-C 3 and COOL-AID at Marshall. “We had to wait for the solar flare to start and then launch it as it happened. No one has tried to do this before.
Fortunately, their method was successful.
“We’re still processing the data from all four instruments, but the data from Hi-C 3 and COOL-AID already looks fantastic,” Savage said.
“The COOL-AID data is the first spectrally clean image in the hot spectral line that we know of,” said Amy Winebarger, Marshall Project Scientist for the Hi-C Flare.
The Hi-C experiment is run by the Marshall Space Flight Center in partnership with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. Launch support is provided by NASA’s Sounding Rocket Program at the Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska at the agency’s Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia, operated by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. NASA’s Heliophysics Division manages the sounding rocket program for the agency.