From NASA
May 17, 2021
For new sun-watching spaceships, the first sunburst is always something special.
On February 12, 2021, a little over a year after its launch, the European Space Agency and NASA’s Solar Orbiter spotted this coronal mass ejection (CME). This view is from the mission’s SoloHI instrument – short for Solar Orbiter Heliospheric Imager – which observes the solar wind, dust, and cosmic rays that fill the space between the sun and planets.
It’s a short, grainy view: Solar Orbiter’s remote sensing won’t go into full science mode until November. SoloHI used one of its four detectors at less than 15% of its normal cadence to reduce the amount of data it collects. However, a keen eye can see the sudden burst of particles, the CME, escaping from the sun, which is outside the camera in the upper right corner. The CME starts as a bright burst about halfway through the video – the dense leading edge of the CME – and drifts off the screen to the left.
The first coronal mass ejection (CME) observed by the Solar Orbiter Heliospheric Imager (SoloHI) appears as a sudden burst of white (the dense front of the CME) that expands into the solar wind. This video uses difference images created by subtracting the pixels of the previous image from the current image to highlight changes. The missing point in the image on the far right is an overexposed area where the light from the spacecraft’s solar array is reflected into SoloHI’s view. The small black and white boxes that become visible are telemetry blocks – an artifact that is created when the image is compressed and sent back to Earth
It was a happy coincidence for SoloHI to catch this CME. When the eruption reached the spaceship, Solar Orbiter had just passed behind the sun from Earth’s perspective and came back on the other side. When the mission was scheduled, the team did not expect to be able to record data during this time.
“But since we planned to do this, the ground stations and technology have been updated,” said Robin Colaninno, principal researcher for SoloHI at the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, originally planned. “So SoloHI winked – and caught his first CME.
Two other imagers on Solar Orbiter – the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager and Metis from ESA – also took views of the CME. Read more about ESA’s coverage of the event.
NASA’s STEREO-A spacecraft, short for Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, also caught a glimpse of its COR2 detector, which blocks the sun’s bright disk to detect otherwise weak phenomena in the solar wind.
The first CME observed by the Solar Orbiter Heliospheric Imager as seen from NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory-A spacecraft. Credits: NASA / STEREO / COR2
Back on Earth, NASA’s Office of Lunar-Mars Weather Analysis modeled the CME to track its trajectory through the solar system. The positions of the Solar Orbiter, marked with a red diamond, and STEREO-A, a red square, show their different angles.
The modeled path of the CME observed by SoloHI on February 12, 2021. The leftmost illustration shows the sun as a white circle in the center, and the inner planets and some spaceships appear in their position in orbit. The middle and right panels show different angles of the same model, with the focus on the earth. Credits: Goddard Space Flight Center / M2M / CCMC from NASA
NASA spacecraft have been watching CMEs for decades, but Solar Orbiter is still a game changer. “We have found over the past 25 years that a lot happens with a CME between the surface of the sun and the earth,” said Colaninno. “So we hope that we can resolve all of these drains much better when we are closer to the sun.”
Solar Orbiter has already captured the closest image of the Sun to date and will only get closer. Solar Orbiter’s official mission begins in November when SoloHI and the rest of the remote sensing instruments are turned on in scientific mode. Stay tuned!
By Miles Hatfield
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Last updated: May 17, 2021 Publisher: Miles Hatfield
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