This is a real smoking gun for nanoflares," said Adrian Daw, the current principal investigator for EUNIS at Goddard. "And it shows that these smaller, less expensive sounding rockets can produce truly robust science."
In addition to having a lower cost, sounding rockets offer a valuable test bed for new technology that may subsequently be flown on longer-term space missions. Another advantage of sounding rockets is that the instruments parachute back to the ground so they can be recovered and re-used. The EUNIS mission will be re-tuned to focus on a different set of solar wavelengths -- ones that can also spot the extremely high temperature material representative of nanoflares -- and fly again sometime in 2016.