DENVER, COLORADO If astronauts are ever to safely transit from Earth to the Moon and Mars, better predictive skills are needed to warn of lethal blasts of energy and high-speed particles from the Sun.

Researchers have snapped the highest resolution images ever taken near the center of the solar disk. The images and magnetic field measurements are the product of research conducted at Swedens one-meter Solar Telescope on the island of La Palma, Spain.

Surprisingly, new small-scale magnetic field structures were revealed, explained Tom Berger, a solar physicist at the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Lab in Palo Alto, California. The smallest "elements" of the Suns magnetic field can be observed as they arrange themselves in the turbulent flowfields of the Suns surface.

Berger led the study, working with The Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics of the University of Oslo.

A variety of magnetic formations that had not previously been detected on the Sun were seen in the images, Berger said. For the first time, after 30 years of hypothesizing and solar observing, small discrete blobs of magnetic fields dubbed "flux tubes" were viewed.

In a related breakthrough, Steven Tomczyk of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado detailed a new instrument that takes landmark pictures of fast-moving magnetic structures in the solar atmosphere.

The device -- a coronal multi-channel polarimeter, or CoMP for short -- can reveal turbulent, high-velocity magnetic features spewing outward from the Suns surface, Tomczyk said. Tests using the instrument were carried out at the National Solar Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico, he said.

CoMP data will permit solar physicists to relate magnetism in the Suns corona to features shooting off the star into space. Such features are the source of "space weather" energetic outbursts that can affect satellites, disturb electric grids on Earth, and play havoc with radio communications. Those same features can also threaten the health and well-being of human explorers beyond Earth orbit.

Mausumi Dikpati, a research scientist also with NCAR, has been modeling the generation of the solar magnetic field. She and her colleagues have created the Predictive Flux-transport Dynamo Model.

"The exact period and strength of the solar cycle is always difficult to predict," Dikpati said. The model can be used to predict the onset of the next solar cycle. Doing so would help gauge potential exposure of astronauts to high amounts of solar radiation.

Dikpati said the model forecasts that the next solar cycle cycle 24 -- will begin in 2007 to 2008. That would mean the cycle would start about a half-year later than if it followed the typical 11-year span.

A real-time astronaut warning system about solar hazards is a must, said Leonard Strachan and Jun Lin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Strachan reported that solar storms last October and November required astronauts onboard the International Space Station to take protective actions on three separate occasions. Future space travelers en route to the Moon or Mars may well need to duck into onboard "storm shelters" built within their spacecraft, he added.

"We have to build up this predictive warning system to protect people traveling in space," Lin said. "Im sure we can do this."

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