Dwayne Brown
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1726
Steve Roy
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.
256-544-0034
RELEASE: 07-72
INTERNATIONAL SPACECRAFT REVEALS DETAILED PROCESSES ON THE SUN
WASHINGTON - NASA released on Wednesday never-before-seen images that
show the sun's magnetic field is much more turbulent and dynamic than
previously known. The international spacecraft Hinode, formerly known
as Solar B, took the images.
Hinode, Japanese for "sunrise," was launched Sept. 23, 2006, to study
the sun's magnetic field and how its explosive energy propagates
through the different layers of the solar atmosphere. The
spacecraft's uninterrupted high-resolution observations of the sun
will have an impact on solar physics comparable to the Hubble Space
Telescope's impact on astronomy.
"For the first time, we are now able to make out tiny granules of hot
gas that rise and fall in the sun's magnetized atmosphere," said Dick
Fisher, director of NASA's Heliophyics Division, Science Mission
Directorate, Washington. "These images will open a new era of study
on some of the sun's processes that effect Earth, astronauts,
orbiting satellites and the solar system."
Hinode's three primary instruments, the Solar Optical Telescope, the
X-ray Telescope and the Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer, are
observing the different layers of the sun. Studies focus on the solar
atmosphere from the visible surface of the sun, known as the
photosphere, to the corona, the outer atmosphere of the sun that
extends outward into the solar system.
"By coordinating the measurements of all three instruments, Hinode is
showing how changes in the structure of the magnetic field and the
release of magnetic energy in the low atmosphere spread outward
through the corona and into interplanetary space to create space
weather," said John Davis, project scientist from NASA's Marshall
Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.
Space weather involves the production of energetic particles and
emissions of electromagnetic radiation. These bursts of energy can
black out long-distance communications over entire continents and
disrupt the global navigational system.
"Hinode images are revealing irrefutable evidence for the presence of
turbulence-driven processes that are bringing magnetic fields, on all
scales, to the sun's surface, resulting in an extremely dynamic
chromosphere or gaseous envelope around the sun," said Alan Title, a
corporate senior fellow at Lockheed Martin, Palo Alto, Calif., and
consulting professor of physics at Stanford University, Stanford,
Calif.
Hinode is a collaborative mission led by the Japan Aerospace
Exploration Agency and includes the European Space Agency and
Britain's Particle Physics Astronomy Research Council. The National
Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Tokyo, developed the Solar Optical
Telescope, which provided the fine-scale structure views of the sun's
lower atmosphere, and developed the X-ray Telescope in collaboration
with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory of Cambridge, Mass.
The X-ray Telescope captured the rapid, time-sequenced images of
explosive events in the sun's outer atmosphere.
"By following the evolution of the solar structures that outline the
magnetic field before, during and after these explosive events, we
hope to find clear evidence to establish that magnetic reconnection
is the underlying cause for this explosive activity," said Leon Golub
of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
The Marshall Space Flight Center manages the development of the
scientific instrumentation provided for the mission by NASA, industry
and other federal agencies.
For more information about Hinode, visit:
-end-
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