Washington, July 3 (IANS) US space agency NASA plans to study the sun’s magnetic field in a “hard-to-observe area called the chromosphere”.
The Solar Ultraviolet Magnetograph Investigation (SUMI) mission will be launched Thursday, Xinhua reported
.
Though there are already instruments that can measure these fields, they are constrained to observe the fields on a particular layer of the sun’s surface.
To measure magnetic fields in the chromosphere, SUMI will observe the ultraviolet light emitted from two types of atoms on the sun, Magnesium 2 and Carbon 4.
This trip for SUMI is largely a test flight to make sure the instrument functions and to assess possible improvements, NASA said.
