\rIRIS must commit to pointing at certain areas of the sun at least a day in advance, so catching a CME in the act involves some educated guesses and a little bit of luck. \r
\r\"We focus in on active regions to try to see a flare or a CME,\" said Bart De Pontieu, the IRIS science lead at Lockheed Martin Solar & Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, California. \"And then we wait and hope that we'll catch something. This is the first clear CME for IRIS so the team is very excited.\" \r
\rThe IRIS imagery focuses in on material of 30,000 Kelvin at the base, or foot points, of the CME. The line moving across the middle of the movie is the entrance slit for IRIS's spectrograph, an instrument that can split light into its many wavelengths – a technique that ultimately allows scientists to measure temperature, velocity and density of the solar material behind the slit. \r
\rThe field of view for this imagery is about five Earth's wide and about seven and a half Earth's tall. \r
\rThe IRIS Observatory was designed by and the mission is managed by Lockheed Martin Solar & Astrophysics Laboratory. NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, provides mission operations and ground data systems. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the Explorers Program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C.
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This was the first explosion known as a coronal mass ejection (CME) that the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, spacecraft was able to observe. The spacecraft must commit to pointing at certain areas of the sun at least a day in advance, so catching a CME in the act involves some educated guesses and a little bit of luck. On this day it focused in on the left side of the sun and happened to see the base of the CME. It recorded super-hot material erupting from the sun at speeds of 1.5 million mph. Watch the video to see it for yourself. || ", "release_date": "2014-08-28T11:30:00-04:00", "update_date": "2023-05-03T13:50:37.754443-04:00", "main_image": { "id": 452388, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011500/a011599/c-1024_print.jpg", "filename": "c-1024_print.jpg", "media_type": "Image", "alt_text": "A NASA spacecraft zooms in on a magnificent solar eruption.", "width": 1024, "height": 576, "pixels": 589824 } }, { "id": 4146, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4146/", "page_type": "Visualization", "title": "IRIS close-up of a solar flare", "description": "The Slit-Jaw Imager (SJI) aboard IRIS (Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph) observes a tiny region of the Sun at an image resolution (0.166 arc-seconds per pixel) almost four times higher than the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) (0.6 arc-seconds per pixel). In addition, IRIS has a narrow slit in the imaging plane (the thin, dark vertical line in the center of the inset) which directs some of the light to a spectrograph which allows solar physicists to determine velocity and temperature of the solar plasma.In this zoom-in from a full-disk view of the Sun from SDO, the imager is observering the Sun at a wavelength of 133nm (1330 angstroms). The imager field-of-view is moved across the solar disk in four steps, allowing the slit to pass over different regions of the Sun to determine the properties of the plasma.Note: IRIS and SDO are in very different orbits. You can see samples of the orbits at The 2013 Earth-Orbiting Heliophysics Fleet. IRIS is in a near-Earth orbit, while SDO is much higher at geosynchronous orbit. This difference in camera location creates a small parallax between the images composited from these two cameras. || ", "release_date": "2014-02-21T10:00:00-05:00", "update_date": "2023-05-03T13:51:10.127894-04:00", "main_image": { "id": 458248, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a004100/a004146/SDO171IRISinsetZoom_stand.HD1080i.00200.jpg", "filename": "SDO171IRISinsetZoom_stand.HD1080i.00200.jpg", "media_type": "Image", "alt_text": "Zoom in combining SDO imagery at 17.1 nm and IRIS/SJI at 133nm.", "width": 1920, "height": 1080, "pixels": 2073600 } }, { "id": 11256, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11256/", "page_type": "Produced Video", "title": "IRIS: Studying the Energy Flow that Powers the Solar Atmosphere", "description": "In late June 2013, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, will launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. IRIS will tease out the rules governing the lowest layers of the solar atmosphere — historically some of the hardest to untangle. Known as the solar interface region, this is one of the most complex areas in the sun's atmosphere: all the energy that drives solar activity travels through it. The interface region lies between the sun’s 6,000-degree, white-hot, visible surface, the photosphere, and the much hotter multi-million-degree upper corona. Interactions between the violently moving plasma and the sun’s magnetic field in this area may well be the source of the energy that heats the corona to its million-degree temperatures, some hundreds and occasionally thousands of times hotter than the sun's surface. The chromosphere is also considered a candidate as the origin for giant explosions on the sun such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections. IRIS will use high-resolution images, data and advanced computer models to unravel how solar gases move, gather energy and heat up through the lower solar atmosphere. Outfitted with state-of-the-art tools, IRIS will be able to tease apart what's happening in the solar interface region better than ever before. || ", "release_date": "2013-06-19T07:00:00-04:00", "update_date": "2023-05-03T13:52:03.795213-04:00", "main_image": { "id": 465631, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011200/a011256/IRIStrailer340.jpg", "filename": "IRIStrailer340.jpg", "media_type": "Image", "alt_text": "IRIS Mission TrailerView the video on YouTube. For complete transcript, click here.", "width": 320, "height": 180, "pixels": 57600 } } ], "sources": [], "products": [ { "id": 12604, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/12604/", "page_type": "Produced Video", "title": "Scientists Uncover Origins of Dynamic Jets on Sun's Surface", "description": "At any given moment, as many as 10 million wild jets of solar material burst from the sun’s surface. They erupt as fast as 60 miles per second, and can reach lengths of 6,000 miles before collapsing. These are spicules, and despite their grass-like abundance, scientists didn’t understand how they form. Now, for the first time, a computer simulation — so detailed it took a full year to run — shows how spicules form, helping scientists understand how spicules can break free of the sun’s surface and surge upward so quickly. This work relied upon high-cadence observations from NASA’s Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, and the Swedish 1-meter Solar Telescope in La Palma. Together, the spacecraft and telescope peer into the lower layers of the sun’s atmosphere, known as the interface region, where spicules form. The results of this NASA-funded study were published in Science on June 22, 2017 — a special time of the year for the IRIS mission, which celebrates its fourth anniversary in space on June 26.Research: On the generation of solar spicules and Alfvénic waves.Journal: Science, June 22, 2017.Link to paper: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6344/1269.full || ", "release_date": "2017-06-22T14:00:00-04:00", "update_date": "2023-05-03T13:47:35.273480-04:00", "main_image": { "id": 414451, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a012600/a012604/LARGE_MP4-2008Apr06GreenFilteredBlueRed-APR422_1280_59.94_large.00001_print.jpg", "filename": "LARGE_MP4-2008Apr06GreenFilteredBlueRed-APR422_1280_59.94_large.00001_print.jpg", "media_type": "Image", "alt_text": "Observations of spicules from NASA/JAXA's Hinode spacecraft.", "width": 1024, "height": 576, "pixels": 589824 } } ], "newer_versions": [], "older_versions": [], "alternate_versions": [] }