One small explorer mission concept was chosen by NASA for further development towards flight, while another concept was chosen for an extended period of concept development. NASA’s Science Mission Directorate Science Management Council selected CINEMA (Cross-scale Investigation of Earth’s Magnetotail and Aurora) as a candidate to begin the Phase B level of development. The CINEMA candidate involves a research team led by Robyn Millan, a scientist at Dartmouth College located in Hanover, New Hampshire, as its principal investigator.
CINEMA’s proposed mission would focus on gaining insights into how plasma energy enters the Earth’s magnetosphere. It’s a very dynamic process that can’t be forecasted. At times, it’s steady; at times, it’s explosive, giving rise to events like fast plasma jets, current systems, and even auroras.
“The CINEMA mission will assist us in investigating magnetic convection within Earth’s magnetosphere, which is an important part of the larger question of why certain space weather phenomena have so much power, such as creating spectacular auroras, while others appear to amount to little,” explained Joe Westlake, Director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The use of multiple multi-point observations to enhance forecasting of their effects on humans and their technology within the solar system is an important part of the future direction of Heliophysics research.”
The CINEMA mission’s satellite system will explore the convective enigma with a complement of instruments: an energetic particles detector, an auroral imager, and a magnetometer on each of the nine small satellites in a polar low Earth orbit. By linking the detected energetic particles in the orbit with the images and magnetic data at the same time, the CINEMA mission will explore a link between energetic phenomena within Earth’s large-scale magnetic field and the visible signs such as aurorae, which occur within the ionosphere. The CINEMA mission has been allocated approximately $28 million for the Phase B phase. The cost for the mission itself, without the cost of launch, will not exceed $182.8m. The Phase B phase will take a period of 10 months. The mission, if selected, will launch no earlier than 2030.
NASA has also selected the proposed mission CMEx (Chromospheric Magnetism Explorer) for the extended Phase A mission study. The extended phase will enable the mission to evaluate and improve their design concepts for possible future emphasis. The principal investigator on the CMEx mission concept study is Holly Gilbert, from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, based in Boulder, Colorado. The cost for the extended Phase A will be $2 million and will take a duration of 12 months.
CMEx represents a conceptual mission that will take place in a single spacecraft and utilize established UV spectropolarimetry instrumentation, which was already demonstrated in NASA’s CLASP (Chromospheric Layer Spectropolarimeter) suborbital sounding rocket flight mission. Based on this heritage mission, CMEx will be capable of investigating the lower levels of the chromosphere within our Sun, where solar eruptions and sources of the solar wind are created.
The missions finished an early concept study that took a year after being chosen as a part of the 2022 Heliophysics Explorers Program Small-class Explorer Announcement of Opportunity. “Space is becoming ever more important. It touches almost every aspect of what we do on a regular basis,” stated Asal Naseri, acting associate flight director for heliophysics at NOAA. “These mission concepts would allow us to make better predictions regarding solar events that may damage communications satellites we use on a daily basis as well as avoid potential harm for astronauts on Earth or at Mars.”
