- Director's Message
- Table of Contents
- Strategic Goals: Science, Facilities & Technology
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Strategic Goal #1, Strategic Priority #1:
Exploring atmospheric, Earth System, and solar processes, variability, and change -
Strategic Goal #1, Strategic Priority #2:
Investigating the interaction of the atmosphere, the broader Earth system, and human society -
Strategic Goal #1, Strategic Priority #3:
Improving prediction of weather, climate, and other atmospheric phenomena -
Strategic Goal #1, Strategic Priority #4:
Developing community models -
Strategic Goal #5, Strategic Priority #1:
Enabling innovative field experiments and measurement campaigns -
Strategic Goal #5, Strategic Priority #2:
Developing new instrumentation
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Strategic Goal #1, Strategic Priority #1:
- Research Catalog
Steve Tomczyk
Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI)
The HMI is one of the primary instruments to be flown on board NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft which is scheduled to launch in late 2008. The HMI will make images of the Sun with 4096 by 4096 pixel detectors in wavelengths around the Fe spectrum line at 617.3 nm in various polarization states. These will allow us to construct images of the velocity and magnetic fields over the entire solar surface with a spatial resolution of 2 arcseconds at a cadence of 90 seconds. The instrument development is led by researchers at Stanford University and the instrument is being constructed by Lockheed. Our role at HAO is assist with the calibration of the instrument and to develop tools to convert the observations into physical parameters such as the magnetic field strength and orientation. One challenging aspect will be to analyze the enormous volume of data in real time. In 2007, we developed and implemented a computer code which can determine magnetic field parameters from polarization measurements faster than any previous code. Next year we will complete a production version of this code which will be incorporated into the HMI processing pipeline.
Figure Caption: Engineering drawing of the HMI Instrument. Light enters through the primary lens at the lower left and is images on the CCD cameras (light green, upper left).
Coronal Solar magnetism Observatory (COSMO)
Driven by society's need to understand the origins of space weather, NCAR scientists at the High Altitude Observatory, along with colleagues at the University of Hawaii and the University of Michigan, plan to build the Coronal Solar Magnetism Observatory (COSMO). The facility will take continuous synoptic measurements of the entire corona in order to understand solar eruptive events that drive space weather and to investigate long-term and solar-cycle phenomena. The primary instrument will consist of a 1.5-m coronagraph with two detector systems: a narrow-band filter polarimeter and a spectropolarimeter. Supporting instruments are a white-light coronagraph to record the evolution of the electron scattered corona (K-corona) and a chromosphere and prominence magnetometer. This new facility will replace the current NCAR Mauna Loa Solar Observatory which has been collecting synoptic coronal data for over 40 years in support of the solar and heliospheric community.
The Coronal Multi-channel Polarimeter (CoMP) instrument is a prototype of the coronal magnetometer to be built for COSMO. In 2007, the CoMP enabled a scientific breakthrough by imaging, for the first time, Alfven waves in the solar corona. These waves were found in observations of the Doppler shift of coronal plasma in the coronal FeXIII emission line at 1074.7 nm. These waves are important in that they may transport energy from the turbulent photosphere and into the solar corona and could explain why the solar corona is heated to a temperature of 1 million degrees. In 2008, we plan to continue observations of coronal magnetism with CoMP and to submit a proposal to the NSF Mid-Size Infrastructure account for the construction of the COSMO facility.
Figure Caption: Concept drawing of the COSMO 1.5-meter coronagraph and dome. The telescope is a simple tube structure on an equatorial mount. The diameter of the dome is 12.2 meters.