Launched from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, the 58-foot-tall sounding rocket carried NASA's High Resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C) telescope.

'These revolutionary images of the sun demonstrate the key aspects of NASA's sounding rocket program, namely the training of the next generation of principal investigators, the development of new space technologies, and scientific advancements,' said Barbara Giles, director for NASA's Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The clarity of the images can help scientists better understand the behavior of the solar atmosphere and its impacts on Earth's space environment. Original article on - A telescope launched July 11 aboard a NASA sounding rocket has captured the highest-resolution images ever taken of the sun's million-degree atmosphere called the corona. The Parker Solar Probe, scheduled for launch in early August with data collection beginning later this year, will eventually fly directly through this region of our star, dipping below the bumpy section - and hopefully deciphering still more mysteries about the solar wind and its birthplace.Įmail Meghan Bartels at or follow her Follow us Facebook and Google+. The team isn't sure what's happening there.Ĭonveniently enough, NASA is due to launch a new mission that will bring scientists even more data about the sun's corona. Before and after this point, the solar wind was relatively easy to track, but in this region, the flow seemed to hit a bump in the road. The new imaging also highlighted a region where things got particularly interesting, about 4.3 million miles (7 million kilometers) above the sun's surface. The research is described in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal on July 18. That structure, hidden below the smooth surface, helps explain why the solar wind flows so turbulently as it travels farther away from the sun. The result is a much clearer picture of the flow of solar wind, showing the smaller structures that make up the seemingly disorganized whole. (Image credit: Craig DeForest, SwRI/NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center) While the processed image may look fuzzier, it's actually a better view of the solar wind, with background stars and dust eliminated from view. The solar wind, as seen before (left) and after (right) serious imaging processing. The process is the equivalent of aligning sequential images of a log drifting in a current so that the log, rather than the trees along the riverbank, stacks up in every image - offering a more detailed image of the log. To do so, they matched up images over time, according to their place in the flow of solar wind, rather than their specific location in space - like tracking individual patches of solar wind as they streamed out of the sun. The cleanup involved piecing together the images in a particularly careful way that considered how quickly the solar wind was flowing out and shifting the images accordingly. Then, they set to work laboriously cleaning up the data to remove confusing factors like the light of background stars or false signals from the instrument itself. To tackle that problem, the researchers first asked for a specific type of data from the STEREO team: long-exposure images that would capture fainter signals. But that data hasn't been detailed enough to let scientists see what's really happening inside the corona, according to NASA.

Sun corona clipart