Sunrise III: Overview of Observatory and Instruments
Abstract
In July 2024, Sunrise completed its third successful science flight. The Sunrise III observatory had been upgraded significantly after the two previous successful flights in 2009 and 2013. Three completely new instruments focus on the small-scale physical processes and their complex interaction from the deepest observable layers in the photosphere up to chromospheric heights. Previously poorly explored spectral regions and lines are exploited to paint a three-dimensional picture of the solar atmosphere with unprecedented completeness and level of detail. The full polarimetric information is captured by all three instruments to reveal the interaction between the magnetic fields and the hydrodynamic processes. Two slit-based spectropolarimeters, the Sunrise UV Spectropolarimeter and Imager (SUSI) and the Sunrise Chromospheric Infrared spectro-Polarimeter (SCIP), focus on the near-ultraviolet and the near-infrared regions respectively, and the imaging spectropolarimeter Tunable Magnetograph (TuMag) simultaneously obtains maps of the full field-of-view of Mm in the photosphere and the chromosphere in the visible. The instruments are operated in an orchestrated mode, benefiting from a new Image Stabilization and Light Distribution unit (ISLiD), with the Correlating Wavefront Sensor (CWS) providing the autofocus control and an image stability with a root-mean-square value smaller than 0.005''. A new gondola was constructed to significantly improve the telescope pointing stability, required to achieve uninterrupted observations over many hours. Sunrise III was launched successfully on July 10, 2024, from the Esrange Space Center near Kiruna (Sweden). It reached the landing site between the Mackenzie River and the Great Bear Lake in Canada after a flight duration of 6.5 days. In this paper, we give an overview of the Sunrise III observatory and its instruments.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2502.06483,
title = {Sunrise III: Overview of Observatory and Instruments},
author = {Andreas Korpi-Lagg and Achim Gandorfer and Sami K. Solanki and Jose Carlos del Toro Iniesta and Yukio Katsukawa and Pietro Bernasconi and Thomas Berkefeld and Alex Feller and Tino L. Riethmüller and Alberto Álvarez-Herrero and Masahito Kubo and Valentín Martínez Pillet and H. N. Smitha and David Orozco Suárez and Bianca Grauf and Michael Carpenter and Alexander Bell and María-Teresa Álvarez-Alonso and Daniel Álvarez García and Beatriz Aparicio del Moral and Daniel Ayoub and Francisco Javier Bailén and Eduardo Bailón Martínez and Maria Balaguer Jiménez and Peter Barthol and Montserrat Bayon Laguna and Luis R. Bellot Rubio and Melani Bergmann and Julian Blanco Rodríguez and Jan Bochmann and Juan Manuel Borrero and Antonio Campos-Jara and Juan Sebastián Castellanos Durán and María Cebollero and Aitor Conde Rodríguez and Werner Deutsch and Harry Eaton and Ana Belen Fernández-Medina and German Fernandez-Rico and Agustin Ferreres and Andrés García and Ramón María García Alarcia and Pilar García Parejo and Daniel Garranzo-García and José Luis Gasent Blesa and Karin Gerber and Dietmar Germerott and David Gilabert Palmer and Laurent Gizon and Miguel Angel Gómez Sánchez-Tirado and David Gonzalez and Alejandro Gonzalo Melchor and Sam Goodyear and Hirohisa Hara and Edvarda Harnes and Klaus Heerlein and Frank Heidecke and Jan Heinrichs and David Hernández Expósito and Johann Hirzberger and Johannes Hoelken and Sangwon Hyun and Francisco A. Iglesias and Ryohtaroh T. Ishikawa and Minwoo Jeon and Yusuke Kawabata and Martin Kolleck and Hugo Laguna and Julian Lomas and Antonio C. López Jiménez and Paula Manzano and Takuma Matsumoto and David Mayo Turrado and Thimo Meierdierks and Stefan Meining and Markus Monecke and José Miguel Morales-Fernández and Antonio Jesús Moreno Mantas and Alejandro Moreno Vacas and Marc Ferenc Müller and Reinhard Müller and Yoshihiro Naito and Eiji Nakai and Armonía Núñez Peral and Takayoshi Oba and Geoffrey Palo and Isabel Pérez-Grande and Javier Piqueras Carreño and Tobias Preis and Damien Przybylski and Carlos Quintero Noda and Sandeep Ramanath and Jose Luis Ramos Más and Nour Raouafi and María-Jesús Rivas-Martínez and Pedro Rodríguez Martínez and Manuel Rodríguez Valido and Basilio Ruiz Cobo and Antonio Sánchez Rodríguez and Antonio Sánchez Gómez and Esteban Sanchis Kilders and Kamal Sant and Pablo Santamarina Guerrero and Erich Schulze and Toshifumi Shimizu and Manuel Silva-López and Azaymi L. Siu-Tapia and Thomas Sonner and Jan Staub and Hanna Strecker and Angel Tobaruela and Ignacio Torralbo and Alexandra Tritschler and Toshihiro Tsuzuki and Fumihiro Uraguchi and Reiner Volkmer and Angelos Vourlidas and Dušan Vukadinović and Stephan Werner and Andreas Zerr},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.06483},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
74 pages, 26 figures. Published as part of the Solar Physics Topical Collection "The Sunrise III Solar Observatory" (https://link.springer.com/collections/jegdciedig)