NASA Science Editorial Team
Jun 10, 2025
- NASA’s CODEX investigation captured images of the Sun’s outer ambiance, the corona, showcasing original facets of its gusty, uneven float.
- The CODEX instrument, located on the Worldwide House Station, is a coronagraph — a scientific instrument that creates an man made eclipse with physical disks — that measures the velocity and temperature of characterize voltaic wind the utilization of particular filters.
- These first-of-their-type measurements will motivate scientists pork up devices of situation weather and better realize the Sun’s affect on Earth.
Scientists analyzing recordsdata from NASA’s CODEX (Coronal Diagnostic Experiment) investigation obtain successfully evaluated the instrument’s first images, revealing the velocity and temperature of field topic flowing out from the Sun. These images, shared at a press tournament Tuesday at the American Valuable Society assembly in Anchorage, Alaska, illustrate the Sun’s outer ambiance, or corona, is no longer a homogenous, valid float of field topic, but an home with sputtering gusts of sizzling plasma. These images will motivate scientists pork up their working out of how the Sun impacts Earth and our abilities in situation.
“We truly never had the skill to support out this roughly science forward of,” talked about Jeffrey Newmark, a heliophysicist at NASA’s Goddard House Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the vital investigator for CODEX. “The simply roughly filters, the simply dimension instrumentation — all the simply things fell into suppose. These are fresh observations which obtain never been viewed forward of, and we mediate there’s rather a few truly bright science to be performed with it.”
NASA’s CODEX is a photograph voltaic coronagraph, an instrument regularly employed to explore the Sun’s faint corona, or outer ambiance, by blockading the shiny face of the Sun. The instrument, which is installed on the Worldwide House Station, creates man made eclipses the utilization of a series of circular objects of field topic called occulting disks at the halt of a protracted telescope-admire tube. The occulting disks are about the dimensions of a tennis ball and are held in suppose by three metallic hands.
Scientists regularly exhaust coronagraphs to explore visible gentle from the corona, revealing dynamic substances, equivalent to characterize voltaic storms, that form the weather in situation, potentially impacting Earth and beyond.
“The CODEX instrument is doing one thing original,” talked about Newmark. “Outdated coronagraph experiments obtain measured the density of field topic within the corona, but CODEX is measuring the temperature and velocity of field topic within the slowly varied characterize voltaic wind flowing out from the Sun.”
These original measurements allow scientists to better symbolize the energy at the source of the characterize voltaic wind.
The CODEX instrument makes exhaust of 4 narrow-band filters — two for temperature and two for velocity — to take cling of characterize voltaic wind recordsdata. “By comparing the brightness of the pictures in every of these filters, we can divulge the temperature and velocity of the coronal characterize voltaic wind,” talked about Newmark.
Working out the velocity and temperature of the characterize voltaic wind helps scientists build a extra appropriate image of the Sun, which is crucial for modeling and predicting the Sun’s behaviors.
“The CODEX instrument will affect situation weather modeling by offering constraints for modelers to exhaust in some unspecified time in the future,” talked about Newmark. “We’re furious for what’s to attain support.”
by NASA Science Editorial Team
NASA’s Goddard House Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md
CODEX is a collaboration between NASA Goddard House Flight Center and the Korea Astronomy and House Science Institute (KASI) with extra contribution from Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF).
