For decades, scientists have suspected that activity in the Sun’s magnetic field is heating the corona. Bart De Pontieu from Lockheed Martin Solar & Astrophysics Laboratory.ĭuring its first flight in July 2012, Hi-C captured the highest-resolution images ever taken of the one and a half million-degree solar corona, revealing previously unseen magnetic activity. “This is the first combined simultaneous dataset that covers the entire solar atmosphere (photosphere, chromosphere, transition region and corona) at sub-arcsecond resolution!” said IRIS Principal Investigator and Hi-C co-investigator, Dr. To meet this goal, Hi-C’s launch and data collection was coordinated with the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), a satellite observatory that captures images of the cooler portions of the sun’s atmosphere. Scientists anticipate that analysis of the imaging data from Hi-C’s third flight will help resolve current questions about connections between the hot and cool regions of the solar atmosphere. “It’s exciting to see how far we’ve come in our decades working together.” “MSFC and SAO have a long history of collaboration in learning about our Sun,” said SAO’s Leon Golub, who was the principal investigator of a series of previous sounding rockets and satellites that led to the Hi-C flights. The SAO team also participates in field operations and science data analysis post flight. This means they mounted and aligned the mirrors, bought the filters, as well as designed and built the structure that holds the mirrors. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) designed and built the optical telescope. The duration of the space portion of the Hi-C mission provided five minutes of observation time with the telescope acquiring an image about every five seconds. The instrument has been improved from the last mission with an updated camera that is expected to improve the data taken from the Sun and the images received. The telescope on Hi-C, the centerpiece of the payload weighing 464 pounds and measuring 10-feet long, is designed to observe a large, active region in the Sun's corona in fine detail. We improved the camera from the last launch and are already getting exciting data from Tuesday’s experiment that could help explain the long-held questions about the Sun’s atmosphere.” So, while we gathered critical engineering data and some images, we did not get the high-quality images of the corona we were expecting. “Our second launch in 2016 had an issue with the camera on-board the telescope of the instrument. “This was the third launch of Hi-C,” said Amy Winebarger, principal investigator for the Hi-C mission at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama. The precision instrument, called the High Resolution Coronal Imager or Hi-C for short, flew aboard a Black Brant IX sounding rocket at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The clarity of images returned is unprecedented and their analysis will provide scientists around the world with clues to one of the biggest questions in heliophysics – why the Sun’s atmosphere, or corona, is so much hotter than its surface. EDT May 29, 2018, on its third flight to study the Sun. NASA and its partners launched a rocket-borne camera to the edge of space at 2:54 p.m. Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, African Art.
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