NASA’s MUSE Mission Passes Key Milestone

NASA's Multi-slit Solar Explorer (MUSE) mission - a spacecraft that will study the Sun's atmosphere - passed a critical mission review on Aug. 21, 2024.

The review, called Key Decision Point C, evaluated the mission's preliminary design and program plan to achieve its target launch readiness date in 2027. With the successful review, MUSE now moves into Phase C, which includes the final design of the mission and fabrication of the spacecraft and instruments.

MUSE will study solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and the Sun's outer atmosphere, the corona. Credits: NASA

"The MUSE mission is critical to understanding more about our star, the Sun," said Heather Futrell, MUSE program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. "The MUSE team has worked incredibly hard so we're very excited to pass this critical milestone and start building hardware to move closer to launch."

MUSE will study the Sun's outer atmosphere - the corona - and the flares and eruptions that travel through there. These eruptions are known as coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, that can impact Earth, affecting our communications and other technology and even creating hazardous conditions for our astronauts.

MUSE will carry an instrument package that includes an innovative multi-slit spectrograph and a context imager, which have the capability to see details of the solar atmosphere down to 200 miles above the solar surface (or photosphere).

"These instruments are so accurate that they can read the year on a dime from a mile away, while telling the temperature of the dime, and at what speed the dime is moving," said Bart De Pontieu, principal investigator for the MUSE mission at the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, California.

The one-of-a-kind spectrograph will measure key physical processes in the solar atmosphere by looking at the Sun through 35 different slits, or windows, that break extreme ultraviolet light into different colors, or wavelengths. This allows scientists to remotely diagnose the conditions in the solar atmosphere as well as study the evolution of flares and CMEs and their release of energy in detail.

"The Sun is the closest star, providing a window to the universe, and MUSE offers many windows on the Sun," said De Pontieu. "MUSE will be able to diagnose the physical conditions in the solar atmosphere more than 35 times faster than previous missions, allowing us to better understand physical processes that occur not only on the Sun, but throughout the universe."

After its launch in 2027, the MUSE mission will also work with other NASA missions to provide a comprehensive view of the Sun and how it affects our solar system. MUSE will take images and study the solar source of the plasma (a superheated state of matter that makes up much of the Sun) in the corona that the Parker Solar Probe and Solar Orbiter spacecraft travel through.

MUSE will also support an exciting student collaboration project, led by students at Montana State University, that focuses on measuring the Sun's X-ray light emittance rate much faster than currently possible.

MUSE is led by the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center of Palo Alto, California. MUSE is managed by the Explorers Program Office at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for the Heliophysics Division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory will build the MUSE instruments and spacecraft, and the University of California, Berkeley, will provide the mission operations center.

By Desiree Apodaca
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

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