MessageToEagle.com - IRIS spacecraft - the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph - is scheduled to
launch in April 2013, according to NASA.
IRIS will study the little-understood lower levels of the sun's atmosphere.
Now, final testing is underway.
Iris spacecraft will make use of high-resolution images, data and advanced computer models to unravel how matter,
light, and energy move from the sun's 6,000 K (10,240 F / 5,727 C) surface to its million K (1.8 million F / 999,700 C)
outer atmosphere, the corona.
IRIS Launch, Deploy and Beauty Pass Animation
Such movement ultimately heats the sun's atmosphere to temperatures much hotter than the surface, and also powers solar
flares and coronal mass ejections, which can have societal and economic impacts on Earth.
Click on image to enlarge
The fully integrated spacecraft and science instrument for NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) mission is seen in a clean room at the Lockheed Martin
Space Systems Sunnyvale, Calif. facility. The solar arrays are deployed in the configuration they will assume when in orbit. Credit: Lockheed Martin
"This is the first time we'll be directly observing this region since the 1970s," says Joe Davila, IRIS project scientist
at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "We're excited to bring this new set of observations to bear on
the continued question of how the corona gets so hot."
A fundamentally mysterious region that helps drive heat into the corona, the lower levels of the atmosphere -- namely
two layers called the chromosphere and the transition region -- have been notoriously hard to study.
IRIS will be able to tease apart what's happening there better than ever before by providing observations to pinpoint
physical forces at work near the surface of the sun.
The mission carries a single instrument: an ultraviolet telescope combined with an imaging spectrograph that will both
focus on the chromosphere and the transition region.
The telescope will see about one percent of the sun at a time and resolve that image to show features on the sun as
small as 150 miles (241.4 km) across.
Click on image to enlarge
Lockheed Martin Space Systems engineer Cathy Chou, integration and test lead for NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) observatory,
inspects the IRIS solar telescope in a clean room at the company's Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, Calif. Credit: Lockheed Martin
The instrument will capture a new image every five to ten seconds, and spectra about every one to two seconds.
Spectra will cover temperatures from 4,500 K to 10,000,000 K (7,640 F/4,227 C to 18 million F/10 million C), with images
covering temperatures from 4,500 K to 65,000 K (116,500 F/64,730 C).
These unique capabilities will be coupled with state of the art 3-D numerical modeling on supercomputers, such as Pleiades,
housed at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. Indeed, recent improvements in computer power to analyze the
large amount of data is crucial to why IRIS will provide better information about the region than ever seen before.
"The interpretation of the IRIS spectra is a major effort coordinated by the IRIS science team that will utilize the full
extent of the power of the most advanced computational resources in the world. It is this new capability, along with development
of state of the art codes and numerical models by the University of Oslo that captures the complexities of this region, which
make the IRIS mission possible. Without these important elements we would be unable to fully interpret the IRIS spectra," said
Alan Title, the IRIS principal investigator at the Advanced Technology Center (ATC) Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo
"NASA Ames is pleased to partner with Lockheed Martin on this exciting mission," said John Marmie, assistant project
manager at Ames.
The IRIS observatory will launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., and will fly in a sun-synchronous polar orbit
for continuous solar observations during a two-year mission.