By Balasubramanyam Seshan: Subscribe to Balasubramanyam's RSS feed
September 1, 2010 1:34 PM EDT
An enormous magnetic filament slowly rose off the surface of the sun, arching out in a horseshoe shape, and erupted on August 25, according to a viewing by NASA’s STEREO-A spacecraft.
The horseshoe-shaped filament expanded and popped about 600,000 kilometers above the stellar surface. Unlike normal course of heading towards Earth, most of the hot glowing plasma simply fell back to the sun. There will be no effects from the blast on Earth, said NASA.
“The spacecraft was in perfect position to record the action as it stationed over the sun's western hemisphere. The action show in an extreme ultraviolet wavelength as an eruptive prominence churns, then rises up, arches out, and finally breaks apart and dissipates above the solar surface,” NASA said.
Prominences are clouds of relatively cool gases suspended in the Sun's hot corona by magnetic fields which sometimes break loose to create these dramatic eruptions. This is one of the brightest and most substantial coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and largest eruptive prominences seen in several years, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center said.
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Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) is the third solar observation mission in NASA’s solar terrestrial probes program (STP). This two-year mission, launched in October 2006, provides clearer view of the Sun-Earth System.
Both the spacecraft buses were built by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), in Laurel, Md., and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center procured them.
These nearly identical STEREO spacecraft buses were launched into orbits that cause them to respectively pull further and fall gradually behind the Earth. This will enable stereoscopic imaging of the Sun and solar phenomena, such as coronal mass ejections.
Because the two spacecraft were in slightly different orbits, the ‘ahead’ (A) spacecraft was ejected to a heliocentric orbit inside Earth's orbit while the ‘behind’ (B) spacecraft remained temporarily in a high earth orbit.
Spacecraft A will take 347 days to complete one revolution of the sun and Spacecraft B will take 387 days. On December 15, 2006, on the fifth orbit, the pair was swung by the Moon for a gravitational slingshot.
On January 21, 2007, the B spacecraft encountered the Moon again on the same orbital revolution, ejecting itself from earth orbit in the opposite direction from spacecraft A.
The two spacecraft will be exactly 180 degrees apart from each other on February 6, 2011, allowing the entire Sun to be seen for the first time. Even as the angle increases, the addition of an Earth-based view from the solar dynamics observatory will still provide full-Sun observations for several years.
In 2015, contact will be lost for several months when the spacecraft pass behind the Sun. After this, they can continue to be operated after rolling by 180 degrees to point the high gain antenna at Earth. They will then start to approach Earth again, with closest approach sometime in 2023.
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