NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) captured images of a gigantic eruption from the Sun's outermost layer for the first time.

The space agency launched the IRIS spacecraft in Palo Alto, Calif. on June 27, 2013 to closely monitor the energy and plasma flow of the Sun for the scientists to fully understand the space weather. The spacecraft is equipped with cameras that can produce high-resolution images, advanced computer models to study how matter, light, and energy travel from the Sun's surface up to its corona.

Scientists believed that studying the Sun's movement would be beneficial as solar flares directly affect Earth by disrupting space weather and human technology.

In February this year, IRIS witnessed its strongest solar flare from the Sun's lower atmosphere with extraordinary resolution. NASA scientists categorized the solar flare as a moderate, or M-class, flare-second strongest class after X-class.

For the first time, the solar spacecraft made another remarkable achievement after capturing images of a new solar event-a coronal mass ejection (CME) on May 9, 2014. The images revealed extraordinary resolutions than ever before; documenting the eruption with a speed of 1.5 million miles per hour.

"We focus in on active regions to try to see a flare or a CME," said Bart De Pontieu, the IRIS science lead at Lockheed Martin Solar & Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, Calif., in a press release. "And then we wait and hope that we'll catch something. This is the first clear CME for IRIS so the team is very excited."

CME is gigantic eruption of solar wind and rise of magnetic fields above the Sun's corona, or outermost layer. During the eruption, the plasma heats to up to tens of millions of degrees causing a speedy movement of the materials. Each CME releases up to 100 billion kilograms of materials with a speed that can reach 1,000 km/second, or 2 million miles per hour. It is considered the biggest explosion in the solar system that occurs every 11 years.