Solar-B To Study Magnetic Fields Of The Sun
Poster: Aron Schatz
Posted on September 19, 2006 at 1:53:20 PM
Japan's Solar-B probe is billed as the first observatory to be able to see the Sun's magnetic field in 3D. While NASA has its own STEREO project that launched as well, it does not do 3D magnetic field study. All this science is good for our understanding on how our universe works.
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"With this complement of instruments, hopefully we'll be able to tie the physics down so that we understand how magnetic fields and high-temperature plasmas interact," says John Davis of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, US. Mission scientists hope that Solar-B will also help crack the mystery of how the outermost part of the Sun's atmosphere, or corona, gets heated to millions of degrees Celsius. That is far hotter than the Sun's visible surface, or photosphere, which makes up the lowest layer of its atmosphere and reaches only a few thousand degrees.