July 4, 2012

Image Caption: SUMIs instruments are designed to study magnetic fields of the suns chromosphere -- a thin layer of solar atmosphere sandwiched between the visible surface, photosphere and its atmosphere, the corona. Hinode, a collaborative mission of the space agencies of Japan, the United States, United Kingdom and Europe, captured these very dynamic pictures of our sun's chromosphere on Jan. 12, 2007. Image credit: JAXA/NASA

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

While the nation shoots off plenty of fireworks for the Fourth of July, NASA will be sending off its own rocket the next day.

The space agency will be launching its Solar Ultraviolet Magnetograph Investigation (SUMI) on Thursday to study the magnetic fields on the sun.

SUMI will set out to study the constantly changing magnetic fields in an area of the suns low atmosphere called the chromosphere.

These magnetic fields lie at the heart of how the sun can create huge explosions of light, like solar flares and eruptions of particles like coronal mass ejections (CMEs).

Whats novel with this instrument is that it observes ultraviolet light, when all the others look at infrared or visible light, Jonathan Cirtain, a solar scientist at NASAs Marshall Space Flight Center, said in a prepared statement. Those wavelengths of light correspond to the lowest levels in the suns atmosphere, but SUMI will look at locations higher in the chromosphere.

The higher layer of the chromosphere is known as the transition region, because the chromosphere transitions there into the part of the suns atmosphere called the corona. NASA said this region is dominated by the magnetic fields, in which solar material heats up dramatically forming the corona and the base of the solar wind.

According to the space agency, understanding the structure of the magnetic fields in the transition region will allow scientists to understand how the corona is heated and how the solar wind is formed.

Read the rest here:

NASA Launching New Sun Observing Spacecraft Thursday