Stereo View of the Sun

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."

Comments

Re:Don't look at the Sun!

[Dr. Zowie]

Ah, jeez, that old thing. Looking at an eclipse is quite a different affair than looking just at the Sun. Looking directly at the Sun with your naked eye is dazzling and maybe a little stupid, but it won't make you go blind: the human eye's minimum pupil size is coincidentally just small enough to handle the energy flux (which makes sense in the context of evolution). Eclipses trigger a bug in the eye's auto-aperture system, so that your pupil can end up wide open as you look at the mostly-eclipsed Sun. That can 'burn' pinholes in your retina.

Nice to see Roland again! (and again... and again)

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, I wonder if anything he submits is ever refused?

Re:Where in Orbit?

[Bad D.N.A.]

"So how far apart are these going to be placed? "

They are both given a deltaV, one + and the other -. They move apart at something like 20 deg/year, one leading the Earth and the other trailing the Earth.

  "Also, what kind of instruments do these have?"

The spacecraft have a pretty broad suite of instruments, in situ energetic particles, fields and waves plus coronagraphs for taking pictures of coronal mass ejections.

One of the problems we have with our pictures of CMEs right now is that they are all taken from Earths orbit, we have never had a side shot of a CME that is going to hit the earth. It will be excellent to have a time sequenced image of the CME, then have that same structure impact the Earth with a full suite of instruments measuring the density, temperature, velocity, etc....