Seoul: The Republic of Korea’s national space agency said Friday it plans to send a solar coronagraph jointly developed with the United States to the International Space Station (ISS) to study the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, and solar wind, reported Yonhap News Agency.
The Coronal Diagnostic Experiment (CODEX), a collaboration between the Korea AeroSpace Administration (KASA) and the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), will be delivered to the ISS onboard Space X’s Falcon 9 rocket Monday (US time) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, according to KASA.
Part of a bilateral solar research project, the coronagraph will be docked with the express logistics carrier on the ISS to observe the corona for up to 55 minutes per 90-minute Earth orbit.
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 solar wind and predict space weather.
Solar wind is a constant stream of particles and magnetic fields released from the sun’s outermost atmospheric layer that affects weather in space.