UAH takes central space science role in two NASA missions

The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) is gearing up for major roles in two NASA space missions. They will take a computational analytics role in NASA’s $492 million Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) when it launches in 2025; and they received approval last week from NASA to help them study magnetic turbulence in space using their $250 million constellation of spacecraft known as HelioSwarm, set to launch in 2026.

The dual roles in the highly prestigious projects will likely lead to additional UAH personnel needed to work on them.

UAH’s Center for Applied Optics and its Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research (CSPAR) were integral to NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope  (JWST) and to the Parker Solar Probe (PSP).

Now, CSPAR again takes science center stage with IMAP and HelioSwarm, both led by Dr. Gary Zank, CSPAR director and co-investigator, and Aerojet-Rocketdyne chair in the Department of Space Science.

The upcoming IMAP launch will be the fifth mission for NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Probes program. It will investigate two important issues in space physics.

The first is the acceleration of energetic particles and its interaction with the energetic bubble known as the solar wind in which humanity lives, and the second is the interstellar medium, the material that fills the space between the stars.

Dr. Zank will focus on the science expectations and the data analysis, as well as its relation to current theory and simulations.

“This will involve extensive analysis of the new data and relating it to the current theories for particle acceleration, modulation and solar wind models, as well as its interaction with the interstellar medium,” said Dr. Zank. “IMAP’s instrumentation offers a major leap forward in studying how cosmic rays are modulated by the heliosphere and accelerated throughout the heliosphere, and in our understanding of how solar energetic particles are accelerated by both shock waves driven by coronal mass ejections from the sun and by solar flares on the sun.”

He said it will also offer unprecedented capabilities for discovering the physics of energetic particles called pickup ions that originate from the interstellar medium but can be found in the solar wind.

IMAP will measure neutral particles originating from interstellar space, providing new insights into how the solar wind interacts with its galactic neighborhood.

“We expect to develop a much better understanding of how some particles gain their fantastic energies, with speeds very close to the speed of light; how this affects the physics of the solar wind dynamically; and how the solar wind and interstellar medium interact, which is a highly complex and nonlinear interaction that represents one of the most challenging problems in both plasma physics and its application to the space environment,” explained Dr. Zank.

Zank is also leading HelioSwarm, a large swarm of nine spacecraft, all traveling fairly closely in a random formation, to measure different regions of volume while being separated in both space and time.

“It is a new NASA mission that will make revolutionary advances in our understanding of turbulence in the interplanetary and interstellar medium,” Dr. Zank says.

NASA has green-lighted HelioSwarm through mid-2024. According to Zank, the examination of magnetic, velocity and density fluctuations in the solar wind has never been done on this scale, and will completely revolutionize understanding of how turbulence moves energy around in space.

After launch, HelioSwarm will reside in near-Earth orbit but it will be positioned outside the Earth’s magnetosphere so it will be in the reasonably pristine solar wind.