The High-Resolution Coronal Imager, or Hi-C, launches aboard a Black Brant IX sounding rocket April 17 at the Poker Flat Research Range in Fairbanks, Alaska. Credit: NASA/Lee Wingfield
NASA‘s 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 – took flight for a never-before-seen view of a solar flare.
The low-noise cameras – built at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama – are part of a suite of cutting-edge instruments aboard the Black Brant IX sounding rocket launched April 17 from Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska. Using new technology, investigators hoped to study the extreme energies involved in solar flares. The experimental Hi-C Flare mission was led by Marshall.
Technology launch and testing
“This is a pioneering campaign,” said Sabrina Savage, Marshall’s lead researcher 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 take flight, but its first flight with onboard instruments including the COOL-AID (Coronal OverLapagram – Ancillary Imaging Diagnostics), CAPRI-SUN (high-CAdence low-energy Passband x-ray detector with integrated full-sun field of view) 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 of the two-week launch campaign window, the team spent approximately five hours preparing the experiment for launch, followed by up to four hours monitoring solar data for a C5 or higher flare with a duration longer than that of the rocket. flight. The launch finally took place on the penultimate day of the campaign window.
“The Sun has been exceptionally 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-duration M-class rocket right before the window closed. »
Rocket flight and data collection
The Hi-C Flare mission launched at 2:14 p.m. AKDT, just one minute after the FOXSI-4 (Focusing Optics X-ray Solar Imager) mission led by the University of Minnesota. Once in the air, the Hi-C Flare rocket’s sensors pointed the cameras toward the Sun and stabilized the instruments. Then a shuttered door opened to allow cameras to collect about five minutes of data before the door closed and the rocket fell back to Earth.
The rocket landed in the Alaskan tundra, where it remained until conditions were safe enough for the team to recover it and begin processing the collected data.
“For tundra launches, we have to wait a few days for the instrument to get back to us and then be dried enough so it can be turned on,” Savage said. “It’s been an anxious few days, but the data is beautiful and worth the wait.”
Innovation and data processingInnovation and data processing
Investigators weren’t just testing new technologies, either. They also used a new algorithm to predict the behavior of a solar flare, allowing them to launch the rocket at the ideal time.
“Capturing a flare in action is really difficult because you can’t predict it,” said Genevieve Vigil, technical and camera lead for Hi-C 3 and COOL-AID at Marshall. “We had to wait for a solar flare to start, 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 look fantastic,” Savage said.
“The COOL-AID data is the first spectrally pure image in a hot spectral line that we know of,” said Amy Winebarger, Marshall project scientist for Hi-C Flare.
The Hi-C experiment is led 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 at the Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska by NASA’s Sounding Rocket program at the agency’s Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia, which is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt , in Maryland. NASA’s Heliophysics Division manages the sounding rocket program for the agency.
