South Korea, US to send solar coronagraph to ISS in October: KASA

SEOUL — South Korea and the United States plan to send a jointly developed solar coronagraph to the International Space Station (ISS) in October to gather information on the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, and solar wind, Seoul’s space agency said Thursday.

The Coronal Diagnostic Experiment (CODEX), a 20 billion won ($14.5 million) collaboration between the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute and the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), is scheduled to be sent to the ISS onboard Space X’s Falcon 9 rocket in October, according to the Korea AeroSpace Administration (KASA), Yonhap news agency reported.

CODEX is the world’s first coronagraph designed to observe the temperature and velocity of the solar wind in addition to the density, KASA said, noting it will help researchers better understand the solar wind and predict the space weather.

The solar wind is a constant stream of particles and magnetic fields released from the sun’s outermost atmospheric layer that affects the weather in space.

CODEX will be given two main tasks: understanding what heats the solar wind to temperatures millions of degrees hotter than the sun’s surface, and testing models that show this heating and accelerating region.

CODEX recently completed its final check-up before takeoff at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the Kennedy Space Center in the U.S. last week for a maximum of a two-year operation in space.

KASA said South Korean scientists were in charge of developing hardware, such as a polarization camera and filter wheels, as well as software for flight and ground operations of the coronagraph, while the U.S. scientists led the development of the optical system and sun tracking controller technology.

“The CODEX project will be a turning point in the solar research on corona, solar wind and others,” KASA chief Yoon Young-bin said, adding that the agency will further strengthen its cooperation with NASA.