Lockheed Martin In The Flow For IRIS

The Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, and a national and international team of co-investigators, have been selected by NASA to complete a $750,000 six-month study to design a new NASA Small Explorer Mission called the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS). NASA selected six missions for study. Two of them will eventually be chosen to move forward to development, with each mission capped at $105 million. IRIS fills a crucial gap in our ability to advance Sun-Earth connection studies. The project will trace the flow of energy and plasma through a dynamic interface region between the solar corona and heliosphere, where all but a few percent of the non-radiative energy leaving the Sun is converted to heat and radiation. Magnetic fields and plasma exert comparable forces in this region, and IRIS is uniquely suited to provide the observations necessary to pinpoint the physical forces at work in this little understood piece of real estate near the surface of the Sun—Palo Alto, California