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An international solar weather monitoring project launched by NASA in 2006 and involving Sydney University Physicists has produced the first three dimensional images of our Sun.
The two Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft were launched in October 2006 and will eventually enable researchers to reliably and continuously track space weather events from the Sun to the Earth and to better predict their arrival time.
Violent solar weather originates in the Sun's atmosphere and can seriously disrupt satellites and radio communications as well as power grids on Earth. STEREO's 3D imaging allows researchers to discern where energy and matter flows in the solar atmosphere much more precisely than was possible with the old 2D images previously available.
Professor Iver Cairns and Professor Peter Robinson from the School of Physics are members of the program's radio and plasma wave instrument team, know as SWAVES, and went to NASA last year to witness the launch of the STEREO spacecraft.
It is expected that STEREO's depth perception capability will help to improve space weather forecasts, of particular interest is a destructive type of solar eruption called a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) which are eruptions of electrically charged gas or 'plasma' from the Sun's atmosphere. Travelling at a million miles per hour CME's dump energy and particles into the Earth's magnetic field overloading power supplies and damaging satellites.
The aim is to accurately predict when CME events are going to take place, however to achieve this forecasters need to know the location of a CME cloud front. For the first time STEREO should allow imaging of the solar disturbances the entire way from the Sun to the Earth.
Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.
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