NASA's CURIE Mission A Groundbreaking CubeSat Experiment

TapTechNews July 11th news, NASA tweeted yesterday (July 10th) that the CURIE mission, aboard the Ariane 6 heavy-lift rocket of the European Space Agency, successfully deployed and is expected to establish ground communication next week.

The full name of the CURIE mission is the CubeSat Radio Interferometry Experiment, which mainly studies the unexplained origin of solar radio waves.

Astronomers have discovered decades ago that radio waves appear during solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs), but where these waves come from remains an unsolved mystery.

TapTechNews note: The CURIE mission will detect these waves through the technology of low-frequency radio interferometry (low-frequency radio interferometry), which is also the first application of this technology in space.

The CURIE mission will launch two independent satellites (combined not even as big as a shoebox), which will orbit the Earth about two miles apart and detect the slight differences in the arrival time of radio waves through the distance between them, thereby determining the exact source of the radio waves.

David Sundkvist, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and the lead researcher, said:

This is an ambitious and exciting mission. This is the first time someone has run a flying radio interferometer in space in a controlled way, so it is a pathfinder in radio astronomy.