Scientists making use of NASA’s STEREO spacecraft have created the first detailed images of a three-day journey by solar wind that slams into the Earth at speeds up to a million miles per hour.
Researchers at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the National Solar Observatory have developed the imagery taken during the Sun’s coronal mass ejection (CME) in December 2008 that shot plasma and other particles at our planet.
“For the first time, we can see directly the larger scale structures that cause blips in the solar wind impacting our spacecraft and Earth,” said SwRI’s Craig DeForest, lead author of a just-released article in the Astrophysical Journal.
“There is still a great deal to be learned from these data, but they are already changing the way we think about the solar wind,” DeForest said in a SwRI press statement.
The team used a combination of image processing techniques to generate the images.
Fundamental physical process
“These data are like the first demonstration weather satellite images that revolutionized meteorology on Earth,” said DeForest. “At a glance it is possible to see things from a satellite that cannot be extracted from the very best weather stations on the ground. But both types of data are required to understand how storms develop.”
Funding for this research was provided by the National Science Foundation SHINE Competition, the NASA Heliophysics Program and the National Solar Observatory by the U.S. Air Force under a Memorandum of Agreement.
The Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory, STEREO for short, is part of NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Probes Program in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The program seeks to understand the fundamental physical process of the space environment from the Sun to Earth and other planets.
Visuals of the changing solar wind as it journeys toward Earth are available at:
http://swri.org/9what/releases/2011/solarwind.htm
By Leonard David