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By Jessica Barnett<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n After months of preparation and years since its last flight, the upgraded High Resolution Coronal Imager Flare mission \u2013 Hi-C Flare, for short \u2013 took to the skies for a never-before-seen view of a solar flare.<\/p>\n The low-noise cameras \u2013 built at NASA\u2019s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama \u2013 are part of a suite of state-of-the-art instruments on board the Black Brant IX sounding rocket that launched April 17 from Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska. Using the new technology, investigators hoped to study the extreme energies involved with solar flares. The Hi-C Flare experiment mission was led by Marshall.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a pioneering campaign,\u201d said Sabrina Savage, principal investigator at Marshall for Hi-C Flare. \u201cLaunching sounding rockets to observe the Sun to test new technologies optimized for flare observations has not even been an option until now.\u201d<\/p>\n It was the third iteration of the Hi-C instrument to take flight, but its first flight with ride along instruments, including the COOL-AID (Coronal OverLapagram \u2013 Ancillary Imaging Diagnostics), CAPRI-SUN (high-CAdence low-energy Passband x-Ray detector with Integrated full-SUN field of view), and SSAXI (Swift Solar Activity X-ray Imager). Following a month of payload integration and testing in White Sands, New Mexico, investigators completed final launch site integration at the Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska.<\/p>\n Each morning of the two-week launch campaign window, the team spent about five hours preparing the experiment for launch, followed by up to four hours of monitoring solar data for a flare that registers as C5-class or higher with duration longer than the rocket flight. The launch finally occurred on the penultimate day of the campaign window.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Sun was unusually quiet throughout the campaign despite numerous active regions,\u201d said Savage. \u201cBoth teams were getting nervous that we would not launch, but we finally got a nice long-duration M-class flare right before the window closed.\u201d<\/p>\n The Hi-C Flare mission launched at 2:14 p.m. AKDT, just one minute after the FOXSI-4 (Focusing Optics X-ray Solar Imager) mission led by the University of Minnesota. Once in air, sensors on the Hi-C Flare rocket pointed cameras toward the Sun and stabilized instrumentation. Then, a shutter door opened to allow the cameras to gather about five minutes of data before the door closed and the rocket fell back to Earth.<\/p>\n The rocket landed in the Alaskan tundra, where it remained until conditions were safe enough for the team to retrieve it and begin processing the collected data.<\/p>\n \u201cFor launches into the tundra, we have to wait a few days for the instrument to get back to us and then to be dried out enough to turn on,\u201d said Savage. \u201cIt was an anxious few days, but the data are beautiful and were worth the wait.\u201d<\/p>\n Investigators weren\u2019t just testing new technology, either. They also used a new algorithm to predict the behavior of a solar flare, allowing them to launch the rocket at the ideal time.<\/p>\n \u201cTo catch a flare in action is really hard, because you can\u2019t predict them,\u201d said Genevieve Vigil, technical and camera lead for Hi-C 3 and COOL-AID at Marshall. \u201cWe had to wait around for a solar flare to start going, then launch as it\u2019s happening. No one has tried to do that before.\u201d<\/p>\n Fortunately, their method was a success.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are still processing the data from all four instruments, but the data from Hi-C 3 and COOL-AID already look fantastic,\u201d said Savage.<\/p>\n \u201cThe COOL-AID data is the first spectrally pure image in a hot spectral line that we know of,\u201d said Amy Winebarger, project scientist at Marshall for Hi-C Flare.<\/p>\n The Hi-C experiment is led by\u00a0Marshall Space Flight Center\u00a0in partnership with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana.\u00a0Launch support is provided at Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska by NASA\u2019s\u00a0Sounding Rocket Program\u00a0at the agency\u2019s\u00a0Wallops Flight Facility\u00a0on Wallops Island, Virginia, which is managed by\u00a0NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in\u00a0Greenbelt, Maryland.\u00a0NASA\u2019s\u00a0Heliophysics Division\u00a0manages the sounding-rocket program for the agency.<\/p>\n