Computer Science – Sound
Scientific paper
Oct 1995
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1995xmm..pres...24.&link_type=abstract
XMM Press Release INFO 24-1995
Computer Science
Sound
Scientific paper
SOHO will carry twelve sophisticated telescopes and other instruments, developed in record time by twelve international consortia involving scientific institutes in 15 countries. Roger M. Bonnet, the Director of ESA’s Scientific Programme said: "Each one of these instruments by itself would be enough to make major breakthroughs in our understanding of the Sun. But what makes SOHO such an exciting mission is that we will operate all the instruments together and find possible links between various phenomena at different levels in the volume of the Sun and in the interplanetary medium". Four years of intense efforts by space engineering teams in ESA and across Europe, under the leadership of the prime contractor Matra Marconi Space of Toulouse, France, have fulflled the dream of scientists who wished to build a superb space observatory for examining the Sun. SOHO, together with the four-spacecraft Cluster mission - which will explore near-Earth space, forms the Solar-Terrestrial Science Programme, the first cornerstone in ESA’s long-term programme 'Horizon 2000'.
No night time for SOHO
Instead of being placed in orbit around the Earth, SOHO will be lofted to a position where the gravitational pulls of the Earth and the Sun cancel each other out exactly, at 1.5 million kilometres sunward from the Earth. This is known in astronomy as the inner Lagrangian point after the French mathematician, Joseph Louis Lagrange, who first calculated its position near the end of the eighteenth century.
SOHO will fly in an elliptical, or "halo" orbit around the Lagrangian point, with an orbit radius of about 600,000 kilometres, allowing the spacecraft to experience perpetual day. It will have a continuous, uninterrupted view of the Sun for twenty four hours of the day, all three hundred and sixty five days of the year, producing an extraordinary amount of data.
All previous solar observatories have either been on the Earth or in orbit around our planet. On the Earth, telescopes are limited by inclement weather conditions and atmospheric distortion of the Sun’s signal, and of course they cannot observe the Sun at night. Although the weather problem has been removed in orbit around the Earth, observations are still periodically interrupted when an Earth-orbiting spacecraft enters our planet’s shadow. In contrast, SOHO will provide the first long, clean uninterrupted views of the Sun.
Science Objectives
SOHO will look beyond the visible soar disk, observing through new windows from the centre of the Sun to the Earth. It will examine three regions - the hidden interior of the Sun, the hot transparent solar atmosphere, and the eternal solar wind of charged particles and magnetic fields that continuously flow outward from the Sun. The twelve instruments on board SOHO are designed to study one or two of these regions in a different, yet complimentary way. Their combined data will link events in the Sun’s atmosphere and solar wind changes taking place deep within the Sun.
The SOHO mission has three principle scientific objectives:
1. Study of the structure and dynamics of the solar interior
2. Study of the heating mechanisms of the Sun's million-degree atmosphere, or solar corona
3. Investigation of the solar wind, its origin and its acceleration processes.
"Never before have solar physicists had the opportunity to work with such a comprehensive observatory giving them access literally to the whole Sun", said Martin C. E. Huber, the Head of ESA's Space Science Department.
Taking the pulse of the Sun
SOHO wil illuminate the unseen depths of the Sun by recording widespread throbbing motions of the Sun's visible "surface", or photosphere. These oscillations are caused by sounds that are trapped inside the Sun. On striking the surface and rebounding back down, the sound waves cause the gases there to move up and down.
Sound waves that penetrate deep within the Sun produce global surface oscillations with longer periods of up to a few hours; smaller, shorter oscillations refer to shallower layers. By considering a sequence of oscillations with longer and longer periods, describing sound waves that penetrate deeper and deeper, SOHO will 'peel away' progressively distant layers of the Sun and establish physical properties inside the Sun's deep interior. Since the technique is similar in scientific principle to using earthquakes, or seismic waves, to decipher the Earth's internal structure, it has become known as helioseismology.
SOHO's helioseismology data may shed light on solar neutrinos; they are insubstantial, subatomic particles created in prodigious quantities inside the Sun's energy-generating core. Neutrinos move at the velocity of light and travel almost unimpeded through the Sun, the Earth and nearly any amount of matter. The difficulty is that underground detectors always observe fewer neutrinos than theory says they should detect, a discrepancy known as the solar neutrino problem. Either the Sun does not shine the way we think it ought to, or our basic understanding of neutrinos is in error.
SOHO's record of surface oscillations may establish the temperature at the centre of the Sun, and tell us if there is something wrong with our knowledge of the way stars shine. If the centre of the Sun is about a million degrees cooler than is presently thought, nuclear reactions would produce fewer neutrinos and resolve the solar neutrino problem. But if the internal temperature has the expected value, then the neutrinos may have an identity crisis, undergoing metamorphosis before reaching terrestrial detectors that therefore cannot see them.
Future SOHO helioseismology observations will also improve our understanding of the solar dynamo responsible for the Sun's magnetic field. The dynamo is located somewhere in the solar interior where the hot, rotating material generates electrical currents and converts the energy of motion into magnetic energy. Magnetic fields, spawned by the dynamo inside the Sun, thread their way out into the solar atmosphere where they mould the electrified gas into an ever-changing shape. The entire atmosphere is continuously transformed by the Sun's varying magnetism, producing activity on a scale unknown on Earth.
Looking inside the Sun
There are three helioseismology experts on board SOHO that will acquire long uninterrupted observations of solar oscillations. Two of them emphasise global, long-period oscillations and sound waves that can penetrate the deep solar interior. They are known as GOLF, for Global Oscillations at Low Frequency, and VIRGO, an acronym for Variability of solar IRradiance and Gravity Oscillations. The third SOHO helioseismology instrument will obtain data for oscillations on smaller spatial scales with unprecedented precision; it is called the Solar Oscillations Investigation/Michelson Doppler Imager, or SOI/MDI for short.
GOLF and MDI employ the familiar Doppler technique for measuring motions of the solar photosphere. When part of the visible surface heaves up towards us, the wavelength of a spectral line formed in that region is shortened; if the region moves away from us, back toward the solar interior, the wavelength is lengthened. (A spectral line absorbed or emitted by an atom or an ion at a specific wavelength that identifies the element; it looks like a line in a spectral display of radiation intensity as a function of wavelength).
Sound waves can also be used to determine the internal rotation of the Sun. Waves propagating in the direction of rotation will appear, to a fixed observer, to move faster and their measure speeds will be shorter. Waves propagating against the rotation will be slowed down with longer periods. Accurate measurements of this oscillation period splitting will determine rotation within the solar interior.
GOLF aims to measure velocities as low as 1 millimetre per second for global surface oscillations with periods from 3 minutes to 100 days. SOI/MDI will obtain precise oscillation data with high spatial resolution, investigating surface oscillations of relatively small spatial scales and short periods. Both instruments w
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