For the previous 17 years, a lone spacecraft has been following Earth’s tracks in its orbit across the Solar and capturing unprecedented views of our host star. Now, STEREO-A has lastly caught up with its house planet, lapping us in our cosmic path and assembly the Earth for a short rendezvous.
On Saturday, NASA’s STEREO-A spacecraft is scheduled for its first Earth flyby since its launch on October 25, 2006, the house company revealed. The flyby just isn’t solely an opportunity for the spacecraft to reunite with Earth, but in addition gives a uncommon alternative for STEREO-A to collaborate with different NASA missions to view the Solar in new and thrilling methods.
The STEREO (Photo voltaic TErrestrial RElations Observatory) mission truly began off with twin spacecraft: the main STEREO-A (for forward) and STEREO-B, which lagged behind. The 2 spacecraft offered the primary stereoscopic, or multiple-perspective, view of the Solar. In some unspecified time in the future, the spacecraft even achieved a 180 diploma separation from one another of their orbits, giving us a simultaneous view of the star as a whole sphere for the primary time.
“Previous to that we have been ‘tethered’ to the Solar-Earth line – we solely noticed one facet of the Solar at a time,” Lika Guhathakurta, STEREO program scientist at NASA, stated in an announcement. “STEREO broke that tether and gave us a view of the Solar as a three-dimensional object.”
In 2014, STEREO-B sadly went silent after a deliberate reset, and STEREO-A was pressured to go solo. Throughout its upcoming flyby, nonetheless, STEREO-A will as soon as once more work as a part of a workforce. The spacecraft will synthesize its views with the Photo voltaic and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a joint mission between NASA and the European House Company, in addition to NASA’s Photo voltaic Dynamics Observatory (SDO).
The collaboration between the photo voltaic missions will enable for a multi-perspective view of the Solar, or stereoscopic imaginative and prescient. It’s just like how our brains examine photographs from every eye and use variations between these photographs to distinguish between nearer and farther objects, creating depth notion. The info gathered by the three missions will enable scientists to collect three-dimensional info that will in any other case be misplaced in two-dimensional photographs of the Solar.
The workforce of scientists behind the STEREO mission are additionally hoping to check a principle about coronal loops, curved arcs of the magnetic discipline that pops up by the seen floor of the Solar. “There’s a current concept that coronal loops would possibly simply be optical illusions,” Terry Kucera, STEREO venture scientist at NASA’s Goddard House Flight Heart, stated in an announcement. “Should you have a look at them from a number of factors of view, [the answer] ought to develop into extra obvious.”
In the course of the months earlier than and after Saturday’s flyby, STEREO-A may also be hit by the plumes of photo voltaic materials which might be directed in the direction of Earth, and can measure these coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Because the photo voltaic materials travels from the Solar in the direction of Earth, it should hit STEREO-A in addition to SOHO and SDO. Previous to this flight, coronal mass ejections have solely been felt by one spacecraft at a time.
“It’s just like the parable concerning the blind males and the elephant—the one who feels the legs says ‘it’s like a tree trunk,’ and the one who feels the tail says ‘it’s like a snake,’” Toni Galvin, a professor on the College of New Hampshire and principal investigator for one among STEREO-A’s devices, stated in an announcement. “That’s what we’re caught with proper now with CMEs, as a result of we sometimes solely have one or two spacecraft proper subsequent to one another measuring it.”
The final time the STEREO spacecraft was near Earth in 2006, the Solar was in its photo voltaic minimal, or the purpose throughout its 11-year cycle with low exercise. The Solar is now approaching its photo voltaic most, and the star has been fairly vigorous as of late. Earlier this week, two massive solar flares erupted from the Sun and disrupted radio indicators within the U.S.
“On this part of the photo voltaic cycle, STEREO-A goes to expertise a basically completely different Solar,” Guhathakurta stated. “There’s a lot data to be gained from that.”
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