| Presentation Title: | The First Solar Flare Rocket Campaign |
| Author(s): | Lindsay Glesener and Sabrina Savage, on behalf of the FOXSI-4, Hi-C FLARE, and early flare alert teams |
Abstract:
On 2024 April 17, two sounding rockets launched telescopes into space during a GOES class M1 solar flare. The FOXSI-4 and Hi-C experiments launched one minute apart and observed the Sun for approximately 5 minutes each with novel, high-resolution, high-sensitivity instrumentation, resulting in unprecedented X-ray and EUV coverage of a large flare. Although solar sounding rockets have been used for several decades to advance scientific investigations and technology, never before had an attempt been made to capture a large flare in progress. This successful endeavor relied on the combined efforts of the science teams of both experiments, a broad coalition of solar scientists eager to take on the problem of when to trigger a launch, and a great deal of development by NASA’s Sounding Rocket Program office and the Poker Flat Research Range.
This presentation will give an overview of the solar flare campaign, including its goals and methodology. It is expected that triggered launches will become a more routine tool for solar sounding rockets, and we will touch on a few ways in which such launches could be used to advance science and technology.