SH21B-4101:
Synthetic White-light Imagery for the Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe Plus (WISPR)
Tuesday, 16 December 2014
Paulett Creyke Liewer1, Yubo Su1, Angelos Vourlidas2, Arnaud F Thernisien3, Russell Howard2, Jeffrey R Hall1 and Eric DeJong1, (1)Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, United States, (2)Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, United States, (3)George Mason University Fairfax, Fairfax, VA, United States
Abstract:
The Solar Probe Plus trajectory, approaching within 10 solar radii, will allow the white light imager, WISPR, to view the inner corona with unprecedented spatial resolution. WISPR, with a 95° radial by 58° transverse field of view, will image the fine-scale structure with arcminute-scale resolution. The dependency of the Thomson scattering on the imaging geometry (distance and angle from the Sun) dictates that WISPR will be very sensitive to the emission from plasma close to the spacecraft, in contrast to the situation for imaging from Earth orbit. Thus WISPR will be the first ‘local’ imager providing a crucial link between the large-scale corona and SPP’s in-situ measurements. The high speed at perihelion will provide tomographic-like views of coronal structures. To prepare for this unprecedented viewing of the structure of the inner corona, we are creating synthetic white light images and animations from the WISPR viewpoint using the white-light ray-tracing package developed at NRL (available through SolarSoft). We will present results from multi-strand models of coronal streamers and currents sheets as well as images of coronal mass ejections as seen simultaneously from Earth, Solar Orbiter and SPP.
