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Science Mission Directorate:
Understanding the Sun, Heliosphere, and Planetary Environments as a single connected system is a goal of the Heliophysics Research Program.
Missions in the News
Operating Missions
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ACE - Advanced Composition Explorer →
ACE's mission observes particles of solar, interplanetary, interstellar, and galactic origins, spanning the energy range from solar wind ions to galactic cosmic ray nuclei.
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AIM - Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere
Fifty miles above the ground, Earth's highest clouds form an icy membrane at the edge of the atmosphere. AIM's mission is to study these mysterious Polar Mesospheric Clouds.
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ARTEMIS - Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of the Moon’s Interaction with the Sun
The ARTEMIS mission is to study how the solar wind electrifies, alters and erodes the moon's surface. ARTEMIS is using two in-orbit spacecraft from the completed THEMIS magnetosphere mission.
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BARREL - Balloon Array for Radiation-belt Relativistic Electron Losses
BARREL is a balloon-based Mission of Opportunity to augment the measurements of NASA's Van Allen Probes spacecraft. BARREL seeks to measure the precipitation of relativistic electrons from the radiation belts during 2 multi-balloon campaigns, operated in the southern hemispheres.
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CINDI - Coupled Ion-Neutral Dynamics Investigations
CINDI's mission is to understand the dynamics of the Earth's ionosphere.
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Cluster →
The Cluster mission is an in-situ investigation of the Earth's magnetosphere using four identical spacecraft simultaneously.
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FASTSAT - Fast, Affordable, Science and Technology SATellite
The objective of the FASTSAT mission is to demonstrate the capability to build, design and test a microsatellite platform to enable governmental, academic and industry researchers to conduct low-cost scientific and technology experiments on an autonomous satellite in space.
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Geotail →
The Geotail mission's primary objective is to study the dynamics of the Earth's magnetotail over a wide range of distance, extending from the near-Earth region to the distant tail.
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Hinode (Solar-B)
Hinode is exploring the magnetic fields of the Sun and is improving our understanding of the mechanisms that power the solar atmosphere and drive solar eruptions.
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IBEX - Interstellar Boundary Explorer
IBEX is the first mission designed to detect the edge of the Solar System.
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IRIS - Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph - Launching Late Spring 2013
The Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) mission opens a window of discovery into the sun's upper layers by tracing the flow of energy and plasma through the chromosphere and transition region into the corona using spectrometry and imaging.
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RHESSI - Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscope Imager →
RHESSI's mission is to explore the basic physics of particle acceleration and energy release in solar flares.
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SDO - Solar Dynamics Observatory
Solar Dynamics Observatory's (SDO) mission is to understand the Sun's influence on Earth and Near-Earth space by observing the solar atmosphere on small scales of space and time and in many wavelengths simultaneously.
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SoHO - Solar and Heliospheric Observatory
SoHO's mission is to study the Sun, from its deep core to the outer corona, and the solar wind.
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STEREO - Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory
The STEREO mission employs two nearly identical space-based observatories - one ahead of Earth in its orbit, the other trailing behind - to provide the first-ever stereoscopic measurements to study the Sun and the nature of its coronal mass ejections (CMEs).
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THEMIS - Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms
THEMIS answers longstanding fundamental questions concerning the nature of the substorm instabilities that abruptly and explosively release solar wind energy stored within the Earth’s magnetotail.
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TIMED - Thermosphere, Ionosphere, Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics →
TIMED explores the Earth's Mesosphere and Lower Thermosphere (60-180 kilometers up), the least explored and understood region of our atmosphere.
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TWINS - Two Wide-angle Imaging Neutral-atom Spectrometers →
The identical TWINS-A and TWINS-B observatories provide a new capability for stereoscopically imaging the magnetosphere.
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The Van Allen Probes
This mission (formerly known as Radiation Belt Storm Probes(RBSP)) was designed to help us understand the Sun’s influence on Earth and Near-Earth space by studying the Earth’s radiation belts on various scales of space and time.
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Voyager
The twin spacecraft Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were re-designated in 1990 as the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM), to observe the edge of the solar system and interstellar space.
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Wind →
Wind's mission is to measure crucial properties of the solar wind before it impacts the Earth's magnetic field and alters the Earth's space environment and upper atmosphere in a direct manner.
Sounding Rocket Missions
In Development-Under Study
About the Missions Fleet
- The Heliophysics flight missions form a fleet of solar, heliospheric, geospace, and planetary spacecraft that operate simultaneously to understand the dynamics of the solar system. This fleet can be thought of as a single observatory, the Heliophysics System Observatory (HSO). Experience has demonstrated that combinations of these missions enable larger scale investigations. This distributed observatory has flexibility and capabilities that evolve with each new mission launched. Knowledge, data, and new interpretive models facilitate the path toward new scientific understanding.
Spacecraft Gallery
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Spacecraft Gallery
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