Stereo View of the Sun

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday November 14, 2005 @08:47AM from the fly-on-the-wall dept.

Roland Piquepaille writes "NASA's STEREO mission will be launched in 2006 with the goal of imaging the sun and the solar winds in 3-D. According to NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center and to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), two identical spacecrafts will be placed in different orbits to provide us with 'stereo' views of the Sun. After the launch in Spring 2006, the two observatories will be separated after a couple of months, one orbiting ahead of the Earth, and the other staying behind. So we should be able to see the Sun in 3-D in less than a year."

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Re:Can't we do that already? by bizard · 2005-11-14 08:58 · Score: 5, Informative

Not to spoil a good joke, but no. Your eyes aren't far enough apart to get stereo vision past about 18 feet. You can move your head around to improve that (and your brain does a good job of faking it), but not good enough for stereo vision at 1au.
Another interesting part of the mission is that over a period of several years, the stereo craft will actually get further away from earth giving us an ever changing view. I just saw a talk at the Berkeley SSL by one of the scientists about the new solar weather modeling they will be able to do with it.