SETI Institute Hosts Joint IRIS–MUSE Solar Science Team Meeting

The SETI Institute recently hosted the Joint IRIS and MUSE Science Team Meeting, bringing together more than 50 solar physicists from around the world for an intensive week of collaboration and discovery.

NASA’s Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) explores the dynamic region of the Sun where the visible surface meets the hot outer atmosphere—an area critical to understanding how solar energy moves and transforms. The upcoming Multi-slit Solar Explorer (MUSE) mission, NASA’s first medium-class solar physics explorer, will take this investigation even further. Launching no earlier than 2027, MUSE will study how the Sun’s corona is heated and how solar eruptions and flares—key drivers of space weather—evolve.

During the meeting, scientists exchanged ideas and compared state-of-the-art models with real solar observations to deepen understanding of the complex processes driving solar dynamics and heating. These discussions helped reveal gaps in current models, identify missing physics, and refine observational strategies.

By fostering close collaboration between observers and modelers, the SETI Institute-hosted meeting accelerated progress toward developing more accurate and predictive numerical models—laying the groundwork for the next generation of IRIS and MUSE science.