One of NASA's Solar Orbiter Tools Caught its First Video of a Coronal Mass Ejection
Anti-aristarchus writes:
Space craft studying the Sun have captured very cool video. Coverage at The Verge.
One of the instruments aboard Solar Orbiter, a probe built by the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA, caught its first video of a coronal mass ejection while whizzing around the other side of the Sun in February. Solar Orbiter, which launched in early 2020, has detected these massive bursts of energy in the past, but the explosion captured in February this year was an exciting first for NASA.
NASA built the Solar Orbiter Heliospheric Imager, or the SoloHI instrument for the Solar Orbiter. It recently captured an energetic gust of solar plasma jetting from the star's surface as the spacecraft was meandering around the Sun. Scientists didn't expect the spacecraft to beam back any exciting images at this point - data is slow to reach Earth from such a far distance, and Solar Orbiter's main mission doesn't kick off until November.
This is where you need to go to the link[*], to see the amazing videos.
But SoloHI delivered the goods anyway, as it came out from behind the Sun and reentered Earth's line of sight, beaming back what NASA called a "happy accident." Two other instruments aboard the Solar Orbiter, the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) and the Metis coronagraph, may have captured different views of the coronal mass ejection around the same time.
Scientists are still piecing together the images from the different instruments to get a clear picture of what was going on near the Sun that day. Around the same time that SoloHi recorded its first detection of a coronal mass ejection, EUI and METIS detected a pair of coronal mass ejections. Other solar-focused spacecraft also captured images and video of the eruptions that day.
Just not something you want to see really up close.
[*] Video appears to be available on YouTube.--martyb.
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