NASA Flare Alert System Helps Sounding Rockets Catch Solar Flares in Progress: Pinpoints Location and Predicts Duration Within Minutes
NASA said on November 4 that scientists have, for the first time, used NASA sounding rockets to study a solar flare in progress, thanks to a new flare alert system that told the team when to launch. The system pinpoints a flare's location and predicts how long it will last within minutes of its detection by spacecraft. A paper describing the system was published on November 4 in The Astrophysical Journal.
Solar flares accelerate particles and release energy into the solar system, which can affect Earth and its technologies. Sounding rockets are a relatively fast, inexpensive way to study light from solar flares that is absorbed by Earth's atmosphere, but they have only about five minutes to observe before falling back to Earth, and flares can fade just as quickly. Launching a rocket to study a flare has been a gamble, because typical flare alert systems cannot tell whether the flare will still be there when the rocket reaches space.
The new system analyzes X-ray and ultraviolet emission from active regions, the magnetically complex areas on the Sun that produce solar flares, as observed by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES), and ground-based observatories.
In April 2024, the system helped the team and another team coordinate the launch of two rockets from Alaska and successfully study a solar flare before it disappeared. In May 2026, the team used an enhanced version of the alert system to launch another rocket that observed three flares.
The team continues to improve the system under a NASA Early Career Investigator Program grant. NASA said the same early warning could support future rocket campaigns, solar observatories, and space weather forecasting.
Source: NASA
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：NASA 太阳动力学天文台（SDO）拍到的 X 级太阳耀斑（NASA，公共领域，经 Wikimedia Commons）。 / Photo: An X-class solar flare captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (NASA, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).
