NASA Teams With Brigham Young University Students To Study Solar Flares

Engineers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Ala., have teamed up with students and faculty at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah, to test an inexpensive telescope to study x-ray emissions from the sun.

Deriving its name from the golden color of the sun and helox standing for HELiocentric Observations in X-rays, "GoldHelox" will be used aboard the Space Shuttle soon to look for flares, not bears.

Fully automated, the x-ray telescope will gather data necessary to increase mankind's understanding of solar dynamics and solar flares. The impact of the sun on life on Earth is enormous. While providing warmth and illumination, the Sun also is a source of radio and electromagnetic emissions that can affect radio transmissions, broadcast and cable television reception, and telephone communications. Variations in solar activity influence Earth's climate and weather patterns, affecting the size and intensity of storms, droughts and deluges, and possibly even the size of the ozone hole.

Studying x-ray emissions from the Sun has proven expensive. As an example, a rocket sent up by Stanford University in California was only able to obtain a 64-second exposure. While a Japanese satellite, "Yohkoh," recently spent three years in orbit taking x-ray pictures, it was discovered that better resolution was necessary to study solar flares. The BYU students' proposal offered NASA and science an opportunity to conduct moderate duration, higher resolution studies by placing GoldHelox in the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle.

The Space Shuttles orbit the Earth once every 90 minutes. For about 20 minutes of each orbit, the Sun is in position for long-duration studies. Since GoldHelox must be pointed at the Sun to study its emissions, the Space Shuttle will be oriented in such a way that the telescope will be able to collect data for the entire 20 minutes that the sun is in a suitable position.

Many individual experiments have flown aboard the Space Shuttle fleet since they entered operation in 1981. Most of these – known as "Get Away Specials" -- simply require that the canister in which the experiment is packed be opened and exposed to the vacuum and microgravity environment of space while the Space Shuttle orbits the Earth. The GoldHelox experiment, however, falls into a different category, known in NASA as "Hitchhiker" experiments, in which the Space Shuttle is actively positioned to assist in the collection of data.

The Marshall Center became involved in the GoldHelox project as a result of the notoriety it received while supporting development of NASA's Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF), a giant telescope that is to be launched to study very faint x-ray emissions originating great distances away from our galaxy. Through a Space Act Agreement signed by NASA and BYU, the Marshall Center's X-ray Calibration Facility and its staff were made available to support the students.

Jeff Kegley of the Marshall Center's Vacuum Engineering Test Branch (EL64), said everyone in the facility was enlisted in the project. "The branch chief, Cary Reily, was in charge," Kegley said, "with support coming from Mark Baker, Jay Carpenter, Greg Chavers, Harlan Haight, Barry Hale, Tom Hill, Dave Javins, John Keidel, Jeff McCracken, Joey Norwood, Richard Siler, Dave Watson, Ken Whitley, and Ernie Wright; along with John Tucker and Chester Berry of AI Signal Research Inc., and George Golden, Dwight Pope, Danny Reeves, Terry Leibold, Ken Lilles, and Dennis Olive from the MSFC photo lab. Without this entire team, the work could not have been accomplished." The work was funded via a partially refundable Space Act Agreement.

"The X-ray Calibration Facility at MSFC is unique in the world," Kegley explained. "With our work in support of AXAF finished, we welcomed the opportunity to use this world-class scientific resource to help these BYU students in their effort to expand our understanding of the sources of x-rays in the universe. In a sense, the work we did with the students demonstrated the flexibility of the facility. Designed to test AXAF, a large telescope that is to look at very dim x-ray emissions from very far away, we were able to modify our equipment so as to help these students design a small telescope to look at an extremely bright, very close source of emissions – our own Sun. The work we did with the BYU student project really enabled us to push the facility's capabilities to the very edge of the envelope and even explore new possibilities."

GoldHelox began as an idea for a paper in technical writing class at BYU. James Maxwell, a BYU physics student with an interest in astronomy, initiated the project in 1987. He recently completed his doctorate in mechanical engineering. Over the past decade, more than 200 graduate and undergraduate students at BYU have paticipated in the effort.

Among the latest group of students working on GoldHelox is BYU senior Jonathan Barnes. He said, "Everyone has learned a lot from this effort. We built GoldHelox on the BYU campus and delivered it to MSFC for testing in the X-ray Calibration Facility. In the process of getting it built, we learned a great deal that will serve us well after we graduate. Since GoldHelox's inception 13 years ago, many of the undergraduate students on the original team have earned advanced degrees and have gone on to work in the space industry, some finding jobs with NASA. The range of talents on the team has been very broad, including students majoring in physics, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, manufacturing engineering, design engineering, business and even English majors – who've done the technical writing and public relations."

"As we developed our test plan for GoldHelox, we recognized the need for a very special test facility. Marshall's X-ray Calibration Facility is ideal. It offers an ultra clean environment in which to assemble GoldHelox's sensitive optics, and – of course – the huge vacuum chamber in which to estimate how well GoldHelox will function in the cold, airless void of space," Barnes said.

Once in orbit aboard a future Space Shuttle mission, Barnes said Goldhelox will take 250-300 images of the sun. "This will provide a kind of real-time movie of solar activity," he said. Interestingly, the GoldHelox's camera uses standard 35mm Kodak Techpan film. X-rays from the sun entering the telescope strike a phosphorus-coated screen which converts the X-rays into visible light that registers on the film.

Deric Eldridge, another BYU student, explained that the telescope will be looking for "microflares" on the Sun. "These may be precursors of periods of intense solar flare activity, just as minor tremors on Earth can predict an earthquake. Being able to more accurately predict major solar eruptions will be of great importance to protecting both space- and ground-based communications systems," he said.

Faculty advisors at BYU for the project are professors J. Ward Moody, Paul Eastman, R. Steve Turley and Vern Jensen.

Operating on a shoe string, the entire project will have cost about $200,000 for its 13-year lifetime – a bargain compared to the cost of some space programs.

BYU's students and faculty advisors are currently searching for experts qualified to help them interpret the solar images GoldHelox is expected to return to Earth. For more information about the project, click here.