Ultraviolet Coronagraph Spectroscopy: A Key Capability for Understanding the Physics of Solar Wind Acceleration
Abstract
Understanding the physical processes responsible for accelerating the solar wind requires detailed measurements of the collisionless plasma in the extended solar corona. Some key clues about these processes have come from instruments that combine the power of an ultraviolet (UV) spectrometer with an occulted telescope. This combination enables measurements of ion emission lines far from the bright solar disk, where most of the solar wind acceleration occurs. Although the UVCS instrument on SOHO made several key discoveries, many questions remain unanswered because its capabilities were limited. This white paper summarizes these past achievements and also describes what can be accomplished with next-generation instrumentation of this kind.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1011.2469,
title = {Ultraviolet Coronagraph Spectroscopy: A Key Capability for Understanding the Physics of Solar Wind Acceleration},
author = {S. R. Cranmer and J. L. Kohl and D. Alexander and A. Bhattacharjee and B. A. Breech and N. S. Brickhouse and B. D. G. Chandran and A. K. Dupree and R. Esser and S. P. Gary and J. V. Hollweg and P. A. Isenberg and S. W. Kahler and Y. -K. Ko and J. M. Laming and E. Landi and W. H. Matthaeus and N. A. Murphy and S. Oughton and J. C. Raymond and D. B. Reisenfeld and S. T. Suess and A. A. van Ballegooijen and B. E. Wood},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1011.2469},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
7 pages, 3 figures, white paper submitted to the NRC Solar/Space Physics Decadal Survey project