Heliophysics Science Division - NASA's GSFC
Coronagraph Prototype Tested at Chinese Eclipse
On 2008 August 1, a total eclipse of the Sun tracked across Canada, Greenland, Russia, Mongolia and China. A GSFC group used this opportunity to successfully test a new solar instrument that is a candidate for future space science missions. A new solar coronagraph, the Multi-Aperture Coronal Spectrometer (MACS), has been designed at GSFC and can only be tested on Earth during total solar eclipses. It is a fiber-optic-based spectrograph used to perform global measurements of the solar wind velocity and the thermal electron temperature of the solar corona. Instead of a slit-based spectrograph, MACS consists of twenty fiber optic tips placed at the focal plane of the telescope and positioned to see different radii and latitudes of the solar corona. Another fiber is placed at the center of the frame and uses the lunar shadow for a measure of the background signal. The other ends of the fibers are vertically aligned and placed at the primary focus of the collimating lens of the spectrograph, thus providing simultaneous spectra from all of the fibers.Figure:
Joe Davila and his eclipse team in the Mongolian desert preparing the instruments for the eclipse.
