By LEE J. GREEN
NASA's Polar satellite spacecraft, which contains two important geospace science experiments from Marshall Space Flight Center scientists, could be tabbed as the "solar hero" or the "sun king".
A couple of thousand miles away from the scheduled launch of the space shuttle Columbia at Cape Canaveral, Fla., next Thursday, the vehicle will launch from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base.
If the mission's findings produce as hoped, future shuttles and fellow satellites will be equipped with greater protetion from the harms of the earth's and the sun's atmosphere, as greater understanding of such phenomena as solar winds, solar plasma, and the magnetosphere are gained.
The final mission in NASA's Global Geospace Science program, the Polar laboratory will be launched in an orbit which loops over the Earth's poles for a three-year mission to study the movement of energetic charged particles above the polar regions. Call it an experiment in "space meteorology."
If you know the environment better, the more high-tech the design you can use on the devices you send in space," said Marshall scientist Dr. James Spann, who is in charge of the Ultraviolet Imager experiment on the 11-experiment satellite which will join a handful of satellites from Japan and the European Space Alliance in the geospace program.
"We're moving into a high-tech society that is becoming more dependent on satellites. Learning how we can construct satellites to protect them from radiation and other atmospheric harms is very important," he said.
The solar environment and the earth's magnetosphere contributed to bring down the Skylab satellite several years ago.
Fellow Marshall scientist Tom Moore, who has been working on the Thermal Ion Dynamics experiment (TIDE) project since the late 1980s, added, "you're defining an element to define a structure to withstand it. This could end up (for one) saving NASA a great deal of money ... and in space in today's times, money is always a factor."
Moore said their hypothesis, contrary to the thinking in most scientific circles, is that the earth's magnetosphere is a bigger producer of solar plasma (which causes the aurora) for the earth than the solar winds. [Editor's note: The hypothesis should read that contrary to the thinking in some scientitic circles, the earth's ionosphere is a bigger producer of magnetospheric plasma than the solar winds.] If the hypothesis and others prove true, the information could help storm modelers design better protection mechanisms for the "solar storms" of energy that do a great deal of damage on earth.
"There is always danger involved in a mission like this because you could be hit by the very thing you're trying to discover how to combat against," Spann said. "The satellite will be flying in the upper atmosphere, but we still have to be concerned about radiation affects from the sun's rays."
The two Marshall scientists have been working on their projects for a combined 20 years. Now at crunch time after a December launch was postponed to next Thursday, the intensity is high, Moore said.
"It's exciting to see what we will find, but this is kind of sad in a way. This is the last time I'll see the (TIDE). It's kind of like an E.T. 'phone home' thing," said Moore, who said data will flow immediately after the launch, but most of the findings won't start coming in until the spacecraft is fully operational in space about 30 days after launch.
Both Marshall-managed experiments on Polar have their own home page on the World Wide Web on-line system already, and those pages will be continually updated as new findings become available, Moore said.
To get the info on the web, the address is http://wwwssl.msfc.nasa.gov/ssl/pad/sppb/TIDE, or instead of /TIDE, add /UVI.
UVI instrument home page
TIDE home page
