SMEI: design and development of an Earth-orbiting all-sky coronagraph

Bernard V. Jackson; P. Paul Hick; Andrew Buffington; Robert E. Gold; George Michael Simnett; Christopher James Eyles; Mark P. Cooke; Nicholas R. Waltham

doi:10.1117/12.513469

4 February 2004 SMEI: design and development of an Earth-orbiting all-sky coronagraph

Bernard V. Jackson, P. Paul Hick, Andrew Buffington, Robert E. Gold, George Michael Simnett, Christopher James Eyles, Mark P. Cooke, Nicholas R. Waltham

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 5171, Telescopes and Instrumentation for Solar Astrophysics; (2004) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.513469
Event: Optical Science and Technology, SPIE's 48th Annual Meeting, 2003, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

The Air Force/NASA Solar Mass Ejection Imager (SMEI) launched January 6, 2003 is now recording whole sky data on each 100-minute orbit. Precise photometric sky maps of the heliosphere around Earth are expected from these data. The SMEI instrument extends the heritage of the HELIOS spacecraft photometer systems that have recorded CMEs and other heliospheric structures from close to the Sun into the anti-solar hemisphere. SMEI rotates once per orbit and views the sky away from Earth using CCD camera technology. To optimize the information derived from this and similar instruments, a tomographic technique has been developed for analyzing remote sensing observations of the heliosphere as observed in Thomson scattering. The technique provides 3-dimensional reconstructions of heliospheric density. The tomography program has been refined to analyze time-dependent phenomena such as evolving corotating heliospheric structures and more discrete events such as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), and this improved analysis is being applied to the SMEI data.

Citation Download Citation

Bernard V. Jackson, P. Paul Hick, Andrew Buffington, Robert E. Gold, George Michael Simnett, Christopher James Eyles, Mark P. Cooke, and Nicholas R. Waltham "SMEI: design and development of an Earth-orbiting all-sky coronagraph", Proc. SPIE 5171, Telescopes and Instrumentation for Solar Astrophysics, (4 February 2004); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.513469

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