EUNIS mission: Six minutes in the life of the Sun
Tuesday, December 11, 2012 - 16:30
in Astronomy & Space
(Phys.org)—In December, a NASA mission to study the sun will make its third launch into space for a six-minute flight to gather information about the way material roils through the sun's atmosphere, sometimes causing eruptions and ejections that travel as far as Earth. The launch of the EUNIS mission, short for Extreme Ultraviolet Normal Incidence Spectrograph, is scheduled for Dec. 15, 2012, from White Sands, N.M. aboard a Black Brant IX rocket. During its journey, EUNIS will gather a new snapshot of data every 1.2 seconds to track the way material of different temperatures flows through this complex atmosphere, known as the corona.