IOWA CITY, Iowa — In just over five months, the University of Iowa will launch its TRACERS mission, currently the largest grant ever awarded to the university.

In 2019, Dr. Kletzing from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Iowa presented the research study to NASA to examine the near-Earth interaction between our magnetosphere and the sun’s solar winds .

This new mission is in some way a continuation of that of the university TRIED missions at the end of 2008 and TRICHED-2 missions at the end of 2018.

These missions also focused on the near-Earth interaction between our magnetosphere, but they were carried out aboard a sounding rocket. These are smaller rockets that can carry small payloads up to 30 to 60 miles above the Earth’s surface before falling back down, giving the TRICE and TRICE-2 missions only a short data sample.

This time around, NASA awarded $115 million to the University of Iowa for the project, with the goal of continuing this research by closely monitoring the same part of space it observed years ago. almost 20 years.

The project name, TRACERS, stands for Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites. It will be a pair of nearly identical satellites that will go into a polar orbit around Earth, that is, an orbit going north to south, rather than following the equator.

(The goal is) basically to study how the sun’s output connects to near-Earth space. It’s the same process that leads to really interesting things like the northern lights, but can also lead to things like space weather, which might be more difficult. What the sun does can be quite dynamic. What the Earth is doing can be quite dynamic, and we want to understand how quickly this environment can change, because that informs our thinking about how you might predict that,” Dr. David Miles, F. Wendell Miller Associate Professor in the Department of physics and astronomy at the University of Iowa and principal investigator of the TRACERS mission, said.

The idea is to better understand this environment to better protect satellites and GPS systems in orbit.

In mid-November 2024, TRACERS undergoes its final tests before preparing it for launch. He will board the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California next April.

If you would like to know more about the TRACERS mission, you can find additional information on the TRACERS missions page Or NASA Mission Page.

The University of Iowa has a long history in spaceflight dating back to the dawn of the space age with Dr. Van Allen and the Explorer 1 spacecraft in 1958.

For a full description of the missions in which the university’s physics and astronomy department has played a role, you can consult the department mission page or the Department of Physics and Astronomy page.