Nasa’s ‘Chess’ rocket to study star formation

Washington: Nasa is launching a new Chess sounding rocket on June 27, which will study vast interstellar clouds to understand more about the earliest stages of star formation.

Chess — short for the Colorado High-resolution Echelle Stellar Spectrograph — is a sounding rocket that will fly on a Black Brant 9 suborbital sounding rocket. Deep in space between distant stars, space is not empty.

Instead, there drifts vast clouds of neutral atoms and molecules, as well as charged plasma particles called the interstellar medium — that may, over millions of years, evolve into new stars and even planets.

Chess will measure light filtering through the interstellar medium to study the atoms and molecules within, which provides crucial information for understanding the lifecycle of stars.

“The interstellar medium pervades the galaxy,” said Kevin France, from the University of Colorado, Boulder in the US. “When massive stars explode as supernovae, they expel this raw material. It’s the insides of dead stars, turning into the next generation of stars and planets,” said France.

Chess is a spectrograph, which provides information on how much of any given wavelength of light is present. It will train its eye at Beta Scorpii — a hot, brightly shining star in the Scorpius constellation well-positioned for the instrument to probe the material between the star and our own solar system. As light from Beta Scorpii streams toward Earth, atoms and molecules — including carbon, oxygen and hydrogen — block the light to varying degrees along the way.

Scientists know which wavelengths are blocked by what, so by lookingat how much light reaches the space around Earth, they can assess all sorts of details about the space it travelled through to get there.

Chess data provides observations such as which atoms and molecules are present in space, their temperatures and how fast they are moving.