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"The Sun in 3D: First Results from the STEREO Mission"
Dr. Angelos Vourlidas
SECCHI Misssion Scientist
Naval Research Lab, USA

When:  Thursday 21 June 2007 at 1:30pm
Where: 2nd Floor Seminar Room

Abstract:

The STEREO mission was launched on October, 2006 with the main
objective to study Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) from their initiation
in the solar corona to their arrival at Earth using a suite of remote
sensing and in-situ instruments on two, almost identical,
spacecraft. The mission objectives are mainly addressed by the imaging
experiment, named Sun-Earth Connection Coronal & Heliospheric
Investigation (SECCHI), which comprises a suite of five telescopes; an
EUVI full disk imager, two coronagraphs covering the range from 1.5 to
15 solar radii, and two heliospheric imagers observing along the
Sun-Earth line from 15 solar radii to the Earth's orbit and beyond. It
is the first time that such imaging capabilities are available and
they will lead to important advances in our understanding of the CME
initiation, propagation, and its three-dimensional configuration. In
this talk, I will showcase the observations and initial results from
the first months of operations of the SECCHI telescopes. SECCHI was
built by a consortium of US and European institutions under the
direction of the Solar Physics Branch at the U.S. Naval Research
Laboratory.

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