Helio Highlights: July 2025 – NASA Science
In July 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the Moon. Now, NASA and its international partners in the Artemis agreements are working to send humans there, this time to stay. The trip will be difficult, especially since space is a very inviting place for humans! An unexpected source of danger will be the sun.
The energy that the sun provides allows life on earth to prosper. But this energy can also be dangerous for us. This danger can be as simple as getting a sunburn if you are in the sun for too long, or as complex as a geomagnetic storm causing chaos in our satellite network.
Things become more complicated in space. On earth, the atmosphere and the magnetosphere protect us from most solar energies. But the spaceship and astronauts in space do not have this protection. For astronauts on the next Artemis missions to the Moon, the sun’s radiation could cause anything, from ruined electronics to a risk of long -term cancer.
On August 2, 1972, a massive solar storm started with the eruption of SunSpot MR11976. One of the coronal mass ejections (CME), he produced a sun race in the earth in less than 15 hours. It is a record that is still held today! This has led to electric network fluctuations and caused wreaking havoc with flight spaces in flight. Recently declassified, American military files show that the storm also exploded sea mines off the Vietnamese coast.
Above all, the solar storm of August 1972 occurred between the missions of Apollo 16 and 17 on the Moon. Studies show that astronauts on the way to the moon, and in particular astronauts on the surface, could have been seriously overshadowed by the radiation which accompanied it. This threat remains real if a solar storm of similar gravity should occur during future lunar missions.
Organizations like NASA and Noaa keep an eye on the sun to predict potential danger sources. If a solar rocket or a coronal mass ejection (CME) is on the way, scientists should be able to identify the danger in advance so that measures can be taken to reduce damage. For astronauts that go to the moon, it can be as simple as taking refuge in a special part of their spacecraft.
The NOAA Times Monitoring Monitoring Program (SWFO) supports their space -meteorological observations and measures. The NOAA CCOR-1 stolen from the GOS-19 spacecraft and provides CME data close to the real real. The CCOR-2 instrument will fly on SWFO-L1. The other missions include Soho, a long -standing collaboration between NASA and the European space agency, and Hermes, an instrument of Heliophysics of NASA intended for the lunar bridge which will orbit the moon.
NASA’s Moon to Mars Space Weather Analysis Office (M2M Swao) also performs space weather assessments in real time. These support the new capacities to understand the weather impacts of space on NASA exploration activities, including the moon.
A large part of the reason why we want to return to the moon is the incredible level of information we can learn about the history of the solar system. “Any object in our solar system does not only exist in isolation,” explains Prabal Saxena, a scientist of the research space in the laboratory of planetary geology, geophysics and geochemistry at the Goddard Space Flight Center in NASA. “He constantly interacts with meteorites and meteors. This is why you see many creators of impact on the Moon. But he also constantly interacts with the sun.” This can come from the solar wind, the CME and other forms of solar energy hitting the sterile surface of the moon.
Saxena stresses that the relative absence of the moon of a magnetosphere means that the lunar surface material effectively traps the evidence of the past habits of the sun. “Many energetic particles that we would see otherwise deflected by the magnetosphere and the atmosphere of the earth have an impact on the surface of the moon. You can therefore really trace what the History of the Sun could be.”
He compares this to scientists who take ice nuclei to have an overview of the atmospheric history of the earth. With everything, proofs of the prehistoric solar atmosphere to information on how the sun affects water on the lunar surface locked in rocks that have been largely intact for millions of years, it is clear why NASA wants to go back and take another look.
But it is always important to keep an eye on the potential dangers for explorers that are both metallic and organic. In an interview, Lennard Fisk, former NASA associate administrator for science and space applications, described a conversation he had with Neil Armstrong. More than anything else during Apollo 11, Armstrong was afraid of a solar push. He knew he could depend on his spacecraft and teammates. But spatial weather was an uncontrollable variable.
We had a different understanding of spatial time in 1969. Spatial radiation, including the solar wind, was a new discovery at the time. But the research carried out at these beginnings has contributed to making breakthroughs still paying today, and we rely on these discoveries with new missions which continue to advance our knowledge on the sun and the rest of our solar system.
