SH31C-2426
Synthetic White-light Imagery for the Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe Plus (WISPR)
Wednesday, 16 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Paulett Creyke Liewer1, Arnaud F Thernisien2, Angelos Vourlidas3, Russell Howard4, Craig E DeForest5, Eric DeJong1 and Anant Desai1, (1)Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, United States, (2)Naval Research Lab, Washington, DC, United States, (3)Applied Physics Laboratory Johns Hopkins, Space Department, Laurel, MD, United States, (4)U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, United States, (5)Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, CO, United States
Abstract:
The Solar Probe Plus trajectory, approaching within 10 solar radii, will enable the white light imager, WISPR, to fly through corona features now only imaged remotely. The dependency of the Thomson scattering on the imaging geometry (distance and angle from the Sun) dictates that the outer WISPR telescope will be 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 at ≤1° resolution. As SPP approaches perihelion, WISPR, with a 95° radial by 58° transverse field of view, will resolve the fine-scale structure with high spatial resolution. 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 simulated observations of multi-strand models of coronal streamers and flux ropes of various size and make comparisons with views from Earth, Solar Orbiter and SPP. Analysis techniques for WISPR images will also be discussed.
