Poker Flat to launch rocket to image solar flares

Poker Flat to launch rocket to image solar flares

The fifth flight of a NASA-led mission using X-rays to learn more about the sun is scheduled for a daytime launch from Poker Flat Research Range during the first two weeks of May.

The latest Focusing Optics X-ray Solar Imager launch will focus on large solar flares. FOXSI-5 is led by assistant research physicist Juan Camilo Buitrago-Casas of the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory.

FOXSI-5 is scheduled to launch aboard a NASA Black Brant IX suborbital sounding rocket sometime from Friday, May 1, to May 15.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute owns Poker Flat, located at Mile 30 Steese Highway, and operates it under a contract with NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, which is part of the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Poker Flat launch updates via text are available by typing PFRRLAUNCHES to 866-485-7614.

"The more we learn about these solar flares, the more we can prevent possible damage to our technology," Buitrago-Casas said. "The sun constantly emits plasma into the interplanetary space, and sometimes that plasma hits Earth."

Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation in the form of light. They are often accompanied by a cloud of plasma that explodes into space at up to millions of miles per hour. That plasma cloud, called a coronal mass ejection, consists of electrically charged particles that carry energy and magnetic fields.

A mass of plasma directed toward Earth can interact with the planet's magnetic field to create vivid auroras and, in stronger events, affect satellites and communications.

Solar flares emit X-rays. The FOXSI instrument can record them at a high sensitivity level.

"X-rays are particularly exciting because we can learn from them about the energetic and powerful dynamics and phenomena that are happening on the sun's corona all the time," Buitrago-Casas said. "We especially want to learn about them during solar flares, the most powerful explosions in our solar system."

Solar flares and coronal mass ejections occur more often during solar maximum, the high point of magnetic activity during the sun's 11-year cycle and when sunspots are most common. Solar flares frequently occur in or near sunspots, where the sun's magnetic fields are strongest and most tangled.

"This is the best time to study the sun, especially large solar flares," Buitrago-Casas said. "We are just coming out of maximum solar activity, meaning we have a high chance to see one of these large flares."

"That's the reason we are here in Alaska, because Poker Flat Research Range gives us the opportunity," he said.

Buitrago-Casas is quite familiar with the FOXSI program.

As a student he worked on the FOXSI-2 detector and on telescope optics for FOXSI-3.

For FOXSI-4 he was primary scientist for the University of California, Berkeley. The overall leader of that mission was Lindsay Glesener, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics.

FOXSI-4, the first FOXSI launch to focus on solar flares, launched from Poker Flat on April 17, 2024.

"We successfully observed a medium-class flare, and it was so exciting that we wanted to do it again," Buitrago-Casas said. "No two flares are equal to each other."

"We can learn a lot of physics by observing multiple flares," he said.

ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Juan Camilo Buitrago-Casas; [email protected]; Sarah Frazier, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, [email protected]

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