mercredi 20 mars 2013

STEREO Watches the Sun Blast Comet PanSTARRS












NASA / ESA - SOHO Mission patch.

March 20, 2013

 STEREO Watches the Sun Blast Comet PanSTARRS

This movie from the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) shows comet PanSTARRS as it moved around the sun from March 10-15,2013 (repeated three times). The images were captured by the Heliospheric Imager (HI), an instrument that looks to the side of the sun to watch coronal mass ejections (CMEs) as they travel toward Earth, which is the unmoving bright orb on the right. The bright light on the left comes from the sun and the bursts from the left represent the solar material erupting off the sun in a CME. While it appears from STEREO’s point of view that the CME passes right by the comet, the two are not lying in the same plane, which scientists know since the comet’s tail didn’t move or change in response to the CME’s passage.

(Click on the image for enlarge)

Images above: Triptych made from three images of STEREO Behind's view of Comet PanSTARRS.

Still from STEREO Behind's Cor2 instrument showing the March 15, 2013 coronal mass ejection, or CME.


Video above: Sequence from STEREO Behind's Cor2 instrument showing three CMEs. Two occurred close together on March 12 and 13. The third, and largest, happened on March 15.

Multimedia items related to this story: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?11226

Images, Videos, Text, Credits: ESA / NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Cheers, Orbiter.ch