24.05.2025

NASA’s MUSE Mission Passes Critical Design Review

NASA/Lockheed Martin

On May 9, NASA’s MUSE (Multi-slit Solar Explorer) mission passed its mission-level critical design review (CDR), a major milestone for the mission’s journey toward launch in 2027. This CDR was a holistic and detailed review of every subsystem and interconnecting harness comprising the observatory. The review was conducted at the Lockheed Martin Space Systems Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, California, by a group of subject matter experts from NASA and the industry.
“We are excited to have passed this crucial milestone,” said Bart De Pontieu, MUSE principal investigator and solar physicist at the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory. “We look forward to the building, integration, and testing of this important science mission.”
The MUSE mission will capture a unique combination of high-resolution images and spectral data of the Sun’s hot, dynamic outer atmosphere: the corona. For decades, scientists have wondered how and why this region is so much hotter than the solar surface, and how the explosive phenomena that it harbors, including solar flares and coronal mass ejections, are driven.
By studying how the solar atmosphere becomes unstable and evolves through flares and coronal mass ejections, MUSE will also contribute to our understanding of space weather events. Insights from MUSE can ultimately improve our ability to prevent harm to astronauts, electronics on Earth, and spacecraft throughout the solar system. 
The MUSE mission is led by the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory. The MUSE mission is managed by the Explorers Program Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for the Heliophysics Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center, along with partner institutions, is building the MUSE instrument and spacecraft, and the University of California, Berkeley, is providing the mission operations center. The MUSE mission benefits from international contributions supported by the Norwegian Space Agency, the Italian Space Agency, the German Space Agency, and from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research.

Quelle: NASA