For Lavina Backman, a materials engineer in the Spacecraft Engineering Division at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), her Asian American & Pacific Islander (AAPI) heritage has served as the driving force for her desire to work within a diverse,
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SAN ANTONIO May 24, 2021 On May 20, 2021, the Polarimeter to UNify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission achieved an important milestone, passing NASA s Preliminary Design Review (PDR) of its spacecraft and payload experiments. Southwest Research Institute is leading PUNCH, a NASA Small Explorer (SMEX) mission that will integrate understanding of the Sun s corona, the outer atmosphere visible during total solar eclipses, with the solar wind that fills the solar system. Passing PDR gets us one step closer to launch, verifying the design options, interfaces and verification methods for the mission, said PUNCH Principal Investigator Dr. Craig DeForest of SwRI s Space Science and Engineering Division. In this challenging year, I m so proud of this team for acing this important design cycle review, from refining the spacecraft design to actually building an engineering model of the Wide-Field Imager (WFI) instrument and other technology we need to image the solar
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NASA recently
released super exciting footage of the first coronal mass ejection, or CME, as captured by its sun-watching spacecraft Solar Orbiter Heliospheric Imager (SoloHI). The video appears as a sudden gust of white that expands into the solar wind. What makes this footage special is that it’s the first solar eruption captured by SoIoHI.
“We ve realized in the last 25 years that there s a lot that happens to a CME between the surface of the Sun and Earth,” said Robin Colaninno, principal investigator for SoloHI at the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. “So we re hoping to get much better resolution images of all of these outflows by being closer to the Sun.”