£4m award gets space research ready for liftoff

Scottish space research has been given a major boost with the announcement of £4m in support for projects on solar flares and the exploration of Mars. The University of Glasgow's Space Glasgow group is spearheading two of 12 new UK-led projects which have received funding from the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) for space-related research. The University's two projects have received a total of €4.8m (£3.95m) in support. Dr. Lyndsay Fletcher and Dr Nicolas Labrosse from the School of Physics and Astronomy will investigate the physics of solar flares, and the School of Engineering's Dr. Patrick Harkness and Prof. Margaret Lucas will build a new type of drill tool to extract and contain samples from the surface of Mars. The F-CHROMA project (Flare CHRomospheres: Observations, Models and Archives) will bring together experts from seven institutions to collect, synthesise and analyse data from satellite and earthbound observations of solar flares. Solar flares are energetic outbursts of solar radiation which span the whole electromagnetic spectrum. Mid-sized flares can release energy equivalent to a hundred million megatons of TNT in just a few minutes, most of which ultimately turns into electromagnetic radiation.