All of this is high-interest science on its own. But it also will provide unparalleled insights into how stars in general behave, and how the radiation and high-energy particles, solar wind and extreme events such as coronal mass ejections emanating from them enables (or much more frequently destroys) the potential habitability of planets that orbit the stars.

I asked Vladimir Airapetian, senior astrophysicist in the Heliophysics Science Division of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and Research Professor at American University, about the potential impact of these new sun-exploring tools on his field and especially on assessing habitability on exoplanets. Airapetian is a team principal investigator in NASA’s Nexus or Exoplanet System Science (NExSS) initiative that brings scientists together to address the question of habitability from a multidisciplinary perspective.

He said the arrival of the three solar observers will have “an enormous impact,” especially in understanding the effects of far less luminous host suns with exoplanets orbiting those suns 20, 30, 40 times closer than in our solar system.

“We don’t know our own sun very well and that limits what we can know about how other stars effect the planets around them…. We can model what energy fluxes a particular star might be sending out to its planets, but those models are limited by the limited data and understanding we have of our sun.”

“These two solar missions plus the most powerful ground-based solar telescope can together revolutionize the field. They will provide data that can and will make sun and exoplanet models so much better. Scientists in heliophysics are very, very excited, and that definitely includes those of us who think about stars and their planets.”

Airapetian has focused on young analog stars in their first 500 million years. It is during this very early phase that the radiation and dramatic events such as flares and coronal mass ejections coming from the star is especially intense, and can permanently make orbiting exoplanets uninhabitable. Or conversely, as Airapetian and colleagues proposed in a Nature Geoscience article in 2016, the solar flares could give a planet sufficient warmth and energy and create the feedstock molecules of life to become habitable.