Update: Launch Successful For Project Studying Solar Winds

Updated: 3:45 p.m. Wednesday, July 23, 2025

As we become more and more dependent on digital communications and commerce, solar flares put that at risk. Two WVU researchers are part of a team working to understand the phenomenon. 

A rocket launched for California Wednesday carrying two satellites for the project called TRACERS, which stands for “Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites.” 

Katherine Goodrich, an assistant professor in the Physics and Astronomy department at WVU, is the Science Operations Center Lead on the project. She is joined by postdoctoral researcher Skylar Shaver. 

They joined news director Eric Douglas just before the launch to explain what was going on. 

This interview was edited for length and clarity. 

Douglas: Explain this project to me in layman’s terms. What are you launching today?

Goodrich: What we’re launching today are two spacecraft. It’s a two spacecraft mission to go into polar orbit around the Earth and look for TRACERS, or signatures of magnetic reconnection in the Earth’s magnetosphere. That’s not necessarily layman’s terms, but that’s the overall goal of TRACERS.

Douglas: What are magnetic reconnections?

Goodrich: If we were sitting in your kitchen, I would say, look to your fridge. What do you see? And hopefully you would say, magnets. So magnets are something that we deal with. Most of us deal with pretty much every day. It’s this metal that sticks to other metal and holds our papers in place and does a lot of other things as well. 

The reason that magnets can stick to other metals is due to something called magnetic field lines. Magnetic field lines are kind of this magical guide where you have a north pole and a south pole, you have lines that connect from the North Pole to the South Pole, and they don’t end, they don’t begin. They’re all just connected to one another. The magical thing is, if you cut that magnet in half, you’ll get two magnets. You’ll get a north and south pole on each of those magnets. So technically, you didn’t really break any magnetic fields or anything. They’re not supposed to break.

The interesting thing about magnetic reconnection is that that violates everything that I said. For magnetic reconnection, how it works on Earth, if you zoom out from your kitchen magnets all the way to looking at the Earth as a marble, the Earth is actually its own magnet. It has a north pole and a south pole, just like the magnets on your fridge. The magnetic fields from the earth actually extend out to very, very far away, multiple Earth radii, and create this little bubble that actually protects us from the plasma that’s being pushed out from the surface of the Sun constantly, and that plasma is called the solar wind. 

The sun has its own magnetic field. So what happens when you have all this solar wind coming from the sun hitting the Earth’s magnetic field? You push these magnetic field lines from completely different places together, and you merge them so close that they actually do break. And what happens is a very energetic process takes place where you actually have magnetic fields realign and then accelerate, or explosively push out particles from that reconnection site, or from that area where the magnetic field lines merge, and those particles essentially are spewed out and go right into the poles of the earth. And when those particles collide with all the particles from our atmosphere, it creates this brilliant light called the Aurora, and that’s where the Aurora comes from.

Shaver: What TRACERS is doing, is tracing how the particles from the sun and the energy from the sun is getting into the Earth’s system, and specifically into Earth’s atmosphere around the poles.

Douglas: We’ve got energy colliding together from the Sun to the Earth, a little bit of it’s leaking through at the poles, creating, amongst other things, the auroras and also the solar flare interaction with our communication system and digital world and that kind of thing.

Goodrich: That’s absolutely correct. 

Shaver: This will influence our satellites, our communication systems, our power grid affected by these types of events. So it’s really important to study.

Douglas: What do you hope to learn from this?

Goodrich:   One, how reconnection works in the magnetic field around Earth in general. The ultimate science goal of TRACERS is to find out whether reconnection happens in one place or in multiple places, or if it happens in one place, but is bursty, and that will help us understand the process of reconnection, and two, help us understand a global how magnetic reconnection affects us globally, so we can better predict how It will affect Earth and better predict how it could influence things like the power grid. 

We could possibly, at some point, develop technology to withstand some of these things, but it’s very important first to predict how these sorts of explosive events can affect us, both in our space, around Earth and on the ground,

Shaver: Magnetic reconnection itself is still an enigma. So that’s what we’re really trying to get at here, is how does magnetic reconnection work, and how does that affect us?

Douglas: I guess I’m still struggling with that point. What you’re calling reconnection is where there’s sparks flying off, for lack of a better way to say it, or is it when it realigns afterwards.

Goodrich: So all of that process is essentially the same as reconnection is a multi step process. Once you start to push these anti-aligned magnetic fields together, then you essentially start the process of reconnection, and that’s step one. Step two is the merging of these magnetic field lines. And then step three is these twisted magnetic field lines that come out, and that’s what causes the explosion, or the acceleration, of all these particles.

Shaver:  Maybe another way to think about it is the sun has its own electricity, sort of current system, as does the Earth. And magnetic reconnection brings both of those together. So it’s like you’re connecting two wires, and it gives you this input into our current system, right in our magnetic field.

Douglas: I actually remember hearing a story in the early days of the telegraph system.

Goodrich: I think you’re talking about the Carrington Event. Is that right? That’s actually in one of my space physics classes. That’s actually the event that essentially started the Space Physics fields that we we know today in modern terms. I’ll say that it started off with this astronomer, Carrington, seeing this giant sunspot on the surface of the sun. He saw that, thought that was cool, and went to bed. And then maybe a few hours later, this huge explosion, all these Aurora lights like lit up in the sky. The Aurora came down to really, really low latitudes, people would have never seen this before in their entire life, and it was to the point where it was actually somewhat of an apocalyptic event. Everybody kind of lost their minds. 

But not only that, yes, the telegraph system went completely down, so that was their main way of communication. For so many people, it was a huge event that clearly disrupted our lives. And because of that, many scientists were inspired to actually physically travel north to see where those northern lights were, or where that happened, more or less constantly, and actually tried to really understand how this works. 

Shaver: So if that happened today, that would be an apocalyptic event, right? A lot of people rely on these technologies now for everyday items and every everyday things that they have to do.

Douglas: Even banking and all of that kind of thing.

Goodrich: Absolutely. I mean, there have been reports of satellites in low Earth orbit actually failing due to space weather events just like this, and the reconnection is basically the start of all that influence on Earth.

Original Story

Events like the Northern Lights and Southern Lights, especially when they are visible outside of their normal range, happen as energy from the sun interacts with the earth’s atmosphere and Earth’s magnetic field. In extreme cases, solar flares can even scramble terrestrial digital communications.

Katherine Goodrich, an assistant professor in the Physics and Astronomy department at WVU, is looking forward to learning more about what is going on when this happens. She is the Science Operations Center Lead on a project called TRACERS, which stands for “Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites.” 

The project’s twin satellites packed with research equipment launch today. 

According to NASA’s website, the TRACERS mission will fly in low Earth orbit through the polar cusps – funnel-shaped holes in the magnetic field – to study magnetic reconnection and its effects in Earth’s atmosphere.

“I organize the members of the team to calibrate, package, and distribute the measurements they will receive from TRACERS out to the scientific community and the public at large,” she said. 

The twin satellites will operate in low-earth orbit and will continually position themselves to follow the day side of Earth. 

Along with Skylar Shaver, a post-doctoral researcher at WVU, Goodrich said they will also analyze the data from TRACERS to “identify markers of magnetic reconnection and how local electric fields guide and are influenced by energy transfer in the cusp of the magnetosphere.”

The launch will take place at 2:13 p.m. EDT from Lompoc, California at the Vandenberg Space Launch Complex. This is a SpaceX launch using a Falcon 9 rocket. 

You can watch the launch online beginning approximately 15 minutes before the launch.