Skip to main content

NASA announces two new missions to study the sun

The sun affects the space environment in more ways than just being a source of heat and light. It also gives off radiation and charged particles which interact with Earth’s magnetic fields in a complex phenomenon called space weather. This can affect both the health of astronauts traveling beyond the protection of Earth’s magnetosphere and electronics like satellites in high orbits. To learn more about the sun and how it affects the space environment, NASA has recently announced two new space missions: The Multi-slit Solar Explorer (MUSE) and HelioSwarm.

“MUSE and HelioSwarm will provide new and deeper insight into the solar atmosphere and space weather,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, in a statement. “These missions not only extend the science of our other heliophysics missions — but they also provide a unique perspective and a novel approach to understanding the mysteries of our star.”

A mid-level solar flare that peaked at 8:13 p.m. EDT on Oct. 1, 2015, captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.
A mid-level solar flare that peaked at 8:13 p.m. EDT on Oct. 1, 2015, captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. NASA/SDO / NASA/SDO

MUSE will be a spacecraft in orbit around Earth armed with two instruments that look in the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) wavelength — an EUV spectrograph and an EUV context imager. It will examine the sun’s corona in particular, looking at how the corona is heated and the outbursts of energy like flares or coronal mass ejections which cause space weather.

Recommended Videos

“MUSE will help us fill crucial gaps in knowledge pertaining to the Sun-Earth connection,” said Nicola Fox, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters. “It will provide more insight into space weather and complements a host of other missions within the heliophysics mission fleet.”

The other mission, HelioSwarm, will consist of a constellation of nine spacecraft which will work together to measure changes in the sun’s magnetic field and solar winds. These winds whip through the outer layer of the sun’s atmosphere, called the heliosphere, which stretches all the way out from the sun and beyond the planets of the solar system.

“The technical innovation of HelioSwarm’s small satellites operating together as a constellation provides the unique ability to investigate turbulence and its evolution in the solar wind,” said Peg Luce, deputy director of the Heliophysics Division.

NASA has not yet announced when either of the missions is scheduled for launch.

Georgina Torbet
Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…
SpaceX just launched two major NASA missions at once — watch the highlights
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying NASA's SPHEREx and PUNCH missions to orbit.

Following a scrubbed launch attempt 24 hours earlier due to weather conditions and a technical issue, NASA and SpaceX successfully launched two missions — SPHEREx and PUNCH — from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Tuesday night.

SPHEREx is a space telescope that will map our cosmos, while PUNCH comprises four small satellites that will study our sun’s outer layer and solar winds. Both were carried to orbit by SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.

Read more
How to watch NASA launch its cosmic detective mission, SPHEREx
NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer), a space telescope, is situated on a work stand ahead of prelaunch operations at the Astrotech Processing Facility at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Thursday, Jan. 16, 2025.

Update: The launch has been moved to Thursday, March 4. NASA states, "The teams need additional time to evaluate launch vehicle hardware data." The article has been updated accordingly.

This coming week sees the launch of a new NASA astrophysics mission, SPHEREx. This space telescope will investigate the origins of the universe, looking at how everything that exists went from being a tiny dot in the milliseconds after the big bang to being trillions of times that size.

Read more
This is what happens ‘when you get two uber-geeks in space at the same time’
NASA's Don Pettit on the space station.



During NASA’s first-ever Twitch livestream from the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday, current station inhabitant Don Pettit and recent returnee Matthew Dominick talked about what it’s like to live and work in a satellite 250 miles up.

Read more