Contact:

Dr. Donald Hassler
(303) 546-0683

Boulder, Colorado- November 16, 2001 -- A team led by Dr. Don Hassler in the Department of Space Studies at Southwest Research Institute™ (SwRI) has recently submitted a $180M proposal to NASA's Mid-sized Explorer (MIDEX) program, to build ESSEX: the EUV Solar Spectroscopic Explorer. The multinational ESSEX team is led by SwRI but includes major hardware contributions from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Germany's Max Planck Institut fur Aeronomie, and Ball Aerospace. Four countries and twelve institutes are represented on the science team.

ESSEX is specifically designed to detect magnetic energy release and wave motion on the smallest currently observed scales (~100 km) on the solar surface. If selected for flight, the ESSEX spectrometer will extend knowledge of solar wave phenomena by over four orders of magnitude in frequency, up to 100 Hz, thanks to a novel "heterodyne" observing mode. Since the discovery by SwRI scientist Craig DeForest of propagating sound waves in the solar corona, interest in solar wave phenomena has exploded. Waves both play an important role in the physics of solar phenomena, and also provide a delicate probe into the physical conditions in the solar chromosphere and corona.

SwRI is an independent, nonprofit, applied research and development organization based in San Antonio, Texas, with more than 2,700 employees and an annual research volume of more than $315 million.