arXiv subjects

D. B. Seaton

Publications and source records attributed to D. B. Seaton.

16 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

The ASPIICS solar coronagraph aboard the Proba-3 formation flying mission. Scientific objectives and instrument design

We describe the scientific objectives and instrument design of the ASPIICS coronagraph launched aboard the Proba-3 mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) on 5 December 2024. Proba-3 consists of two spacecraft in a highly elliptical orbit around the Earth. One spacecraft carries the telescope, and the external occulter is mounted on the second spacecraft. The two spacecraft fly in a precise formation during 6 hours out of 19.63 hour orbit, together forming a giant solar coronagraph called ASPIICS (Association of Spacecraft for Polarimetric and Imaging Investigation of the Corona of the Sun). Very long distance between the external occulter and the telescope (around 144 m) represents an increase of two orders of magnitude compared to classical externally occulted solar coronagraphs. This allows us to observe the inner corona in eclipse-like conditions, i.e. close to the solar limb (down to 1.099 Rs) and with very low straylight. ASPIICS will provide a new perspective on the inner solar corona that will help solve several outstanding problems in solar physics, such as the origin of the slow solar wind and physical mechanism of coronal mass ejections.

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arXiv2023

The Multiview Observatory for Solar Terrestrial Science (MOST)

We report on a study of the Multiview Observatory for Solar Terrestrial Science (MOST) mission that will provide comprehensive imagery and time series data needed to understand the magnetic connection between the solar interior and the solar atmosphere/inner heliosphere. MOST will build upon the successes of SOHO and STEREO missions with new views of the Sun and enhanced instrument capabilities. This article is based on a study conducted at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center that determined the required instrument refinement, spacecraft accommodation, launch configuration, and flight dynamics for mission success. MOST is envisioned as the next generation great observatory positioned to obtain three-dimensional information of large-scale heliospheric structures such as coronal mass ejections, stream interaction regions, and the solar wind itself. The MOST mission consists of 2 pairs of spacecraft located in the vicinity of Sun-Earth Lagrange points L4 (MOST1, MOST3) and L5 (MOST2 and MOST4). The spacecraft stationed at L4 (MOST1) and L5 (MOST2) will each carry seven remote-sensing and three in-situ instrument suites, including a novel radio package known as the Faraday Effect Tracker of Coronal and Heliospheric structures (FETCH). MOST3 and MOST4 will carry only the FETCH instruments and are positioned at variable locations along the Earth orbit up to 20° ahead of L4 and 20° behind L5, respectively. FETCH will have polarized radio transmitters and receivers on all four spacecraft to measure the magnetic content of solar wind structures propagating from the Sun to Earth using the Faraday rotation technique. The MOST mission will be able to sample the magnetized plasma throughout the Sun-Earth connected space during the mission lifetime over a solar cycle.

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arXiv2023

Picoflare jets power the solar wind emerging from a coronal hole on the Sun

Coronal holes are areas on the Sun with open magnetic field lines. They are a source region of the solar wind, but how the wind emerges from coronal holes is not known. We observed a coronal hole using the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager on the Solar Orbiter spacecraft. We identified jets on scales of a few hundred kilometers, which last 20 to 100 seconds and reach speeds of ~100 kilometers per second. The jets are powered by magnetic reconnection and have kinetic energy in the picoflare range. They are intermittent but widespread within the observed coronal hole. We suggest that such picoflare jets could produce enough high-temperature plasma to sustain the solar wind and that the wind emerges from coronal holes as a highly intermittent outflow at small scales.

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arXiv2023

Coma Off It: Removing Variable Point Spread Functions from Astronomical Images

We describe a rapid and direct method for regularizing, post-facto, the point-spread function (PSF) of a telescope or other imaging instrument, across its entire field of view. Imaging instruments in general blur point sources of light by local convolution with a point-spread function that varies slowly across the field of view, due to coma, spherical aberration, and similar effects. It is possible to regularize the PSF in post-processing, producing data with a homogeneous ``effective PSF'' across the entire field of view. In turn, the method enables seamless wide-field astronomical mosaics at higher resolution than would otherwise be achievable, and potentially changes the design trade space for telescopes, lenses, and other optical systems where data uniformity is important. For many kinds of optical aberration, simple and rapid convolution with a locally optimized ``transfer PSF'' produces extremely uniform imaging properties at low computational cost. PSF regularization} does not require access to the instrument that obtained the data, and can be bootstrapped from existing data sets that include starfield images or other means of estimating the PSF across the field.

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arXiv2023

Magnetic Reconnection as the Driver of the Solar Wind

We present EUV solar observations showing evidence for omnipresent jetting activity driven by small-scale magnetic reconnection at the base of the solar corona. We argue that the physical mechanism that heats and drives the solar wind at its source is ubiquitous magnetic reconnection in the form of small-scale jetting activity (i.e., a.k.a. jetlets). This jetting activity, like the solar wind and the heating of the coronal plasma, are ubiquitous regardless of the solar cycle phase. Each event arises from small-scale reconnection of opposite polarity magnetic fields producing a short-lived jet of hot plasma and Alfvén waves into the corona. The discrete nature of these jetlet events leads to intermittent outflows from the corona, which homogenize as they propagate away from the Sun and form the solar wind. This discovery establishes the importance of small-scale magnetic reconnection in solar and stellar atmospheres in understanding ubiquitous phenomena such as coronal heating and solar wind acceleration. Based on previous analyses linking the switchbacks to the magnetic network, we also argue that these new observations might provide the link between the magnetic activity at the base of the corona and the switchback solar wind phenomenon. These new observations need to be put in the bigger picture of the role of magnetic reconnection and the diverse form of jetting in the solar atmosphere.

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arXiv2022

Direct observations of a complex coronal web driving highly structured slow solar wind

The solar wind consists of continuous streams of charged particles that escape into the heliosphere from the Sun, and is split into fast and slow components, with the fast wind emerging from the interiors of coronal holes. Near the ecliptic plane, the fast wind from low-latitude coronal holes is interspersed with a highly structured slow solar wind, the source regions and drivers of which are poorly understood. Here we report extreme-ultraviolet observations that reveal a spatially complex web of magnetized plasma structures that persistently interact and reconnect in the middle corona. Coronagraphic white-light images show concurrent emergence of slow wind streams over these coronal web structures. With advanced global MHD coronal models, we demonstrate that the observed coronal web is a direct imprint of the magnetic separatrix web (S-web). By revealing a highly dynamic portion of the S-web, our observations open a window into important middle-coronal processes that appear to play a key role in driving the structured slow solar wind.

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arXiv2022

Square Root Compression and Noise Effects in Digitally Transformed Images

We report on a particular example of noise and data representation interacting to introduce systematic error. Many instruments collect integer digitized values and appy nonlinear coding, in particular square-root coding, to compress the data for transfer or downlink; this can introduce surprising systematic errors when they are decoded for analysis. Square root coding and subsequent decoding typically introduces a variable, $\pm 1$ count value-dependent systematic bias in the data after reconstitution. This is significant when large numbers of measurements (e.g., image pixels) are averaged together. Using direct modeling of the probabiliity distribution of particular coded values in the presence of instrument noise, one may apply Bayes' Theorem to construct a decoding table that reduces this error source to a very small fraction of a digitizer step; in our example, systematic error from square root coding is reduced by a factor of 20 from 0.23 count RMS to 0.013 count RMS. The method is suitable both for new experiments such as the upcoming PUNCH mission, and also for post facto application to existing data sets -- even if the instrument noise properties are only loosely known. Further, the method does not depend on the specifics of the coding formula, and may be applied to other forms of nonlinear coding or representation of data values.

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arXiv2022

Prominence eruption observed in He II 304 Å up to $>6 R_\sun$ by EUI/FSI aboard Solar Orbiter

We report observations of a unique, large prominence eruption that was observed in the He II 304 Å passband of the the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager/Full Sun Imager telescope aboard Solar Orbiter on 15-16 February 2022. Observations from several vantage points (Solar Orbiter, the Solar-Terrestrial Relations Observatory, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, and Earth-orbiting satellites) were used to measure the kinematics of the erupting prominence and the associated coronal mass ejection. Three-dimensional reconstruction was used to calculate the deprojected positions and speeds of different parts of the prominence. Observations in several passbands allowed us to analyse the radiative properties of the erupting prominence. The leading parts of the erupting prominence and the leading edge of the corresponding coronal mass ejection propagate at speeds of around 1700 km/s and 2200 km/s, respectively, while the trailing parts of the prominence are significantly slower (around 500 km/s). Parts of the prominence are tracked up to heights of over $6 R_\sun$. The He II emission is probably produced via collisional excitation rather than scattering. Surprisingly, the brightness of a trailing feature increases with height. The reported prominence is the first observed in He II 304 Å emission at such a great height (above 6 $R_\sun$).

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arXiv2018

Modeling and removal of optical ghosts in the PROBA-3/ASPIICS externally occulted solar coronagraph

Context: ASPIICS is a novel externally occulted solar coronagraph, which will be launched onboard the PROBA-3 mission of the European Space Agency. The external occulter will be placed on the first satellite approximately 150 m ahead of the second satellite that will carry an optical instrument. During 6 hours per orbit, the satellites will fly in a precise formation, constituting a giant externally occulted coronagraph. Large distance between the external occulter and the primary objective will allow observations of the white-light solar corona starting from extremely low heights 1.1RSun. Aims: To analyze influence of optical ghost images formed inside the telescope and develop an algorithm for their removal. Methods: We implement the optical layout of ASPIICS in Zemax and study the ghost behaviour in sequential and non-sequential regimes. We identify sources of the ghost contributions and analyze their geometrical behaviour. Finally we develop a mathematical model and software to calculate ghost images for any given input image. Results: We show that ghost light can be important in the outer part of the field of view, where the coronal signal is weak, since the energy of bright inner corona is redistributed to the outer corona. However the model allows to remove the ghost contribution. Due to a large distance between the external occulter and the primary objective, the primary objective does not produce a significant ghost. The use of the Lyot spot in ASPIICS is not necessary.

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arXiv2018

Global Non-Potential Magnetic Models of the Solar Corona During the March 2015 Eclipse

Seven different models are applied to the same problem of simulating the Sun's coronal magnetic field during the solar eclipse on 2015 March 20. All of the models are non-potential, allowing for free magnetic energy, but the associated electric currents are developed in significantly different ways. This is not a direct comparison of the coronal modelling techniques, in that the different models also use different photospheric boundary conditions, reflecting the range of approaches currently used in the community. Despite the significant differences, the results show broad agreement in the overall magnetic topology. Among those models with significant volume currents in much of the corona, there is general agreement that the ratio of total to potential magnetic energy should be approximately 1.4. However, there are significant differences in the electric current distributions; while static extrapolations are best able to reproduce active regions, they are unable to recover sheared magnetic fields in filament channels using currently available vector magnetogram data. By contrast, time-evolving simulations can recover the filament channel fields at the expense of not matching the observed vector magnetic fields within active regions. We suggest that, at present, the best approach may be a hybrid model using static extrapolations but with additional energization informed by simplified evolution models. This is demonstrated by one of the models.

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arXiv2014

Observational Characteristics of CMEs without Low Coronal Signatures

Solar eruptions are usually associated with a variety of phenomena occurring in the low corona before, during, and after onset of eruption. Though easily visible in coronagraph observations, so-called stealth coronal mass ejections (CMEs) do not obviously exhibit any of these low-coronal signatures. The presence or absence of distinct low coronal signatures can be linked to different theoretical models to establish the mechanisms by which the eruption is initiated and driven. In this study, 40 CMEs without low coronal signatures, occurring in 2012, are identified. Their observational and kinematic properties are analyzed and compared to those of regular CMEs. Solar eruptions without clear on-disk or low coronal signatures can lead to unexpected space weather impacts, since many early warning signs for significant space weather activity are not present in these events. A better understanding of their initiation mechanism(s) will considerably improve the ability to predict such space weather events.

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arXiv2012

The SWAP EUV Imaging Telescope Part I: Instrument Overview and Pre-Flight Testing

The Sun Watcher with Active Pixels and Image Processing (SWAP) is an EUV solar telescope on board ESA's Project for Onboard Autonomy 2 (PROBA2) mission launched on 2 November 2009. SWAP has a spectral bandpass centered on 17.4 nm and provides images of the low solar corona over a 54x54 arcmin field-of-view with 3.2 arcsec pixels and an imaging cadence of about two minutes. SWAP is designed to monitor all space-weather-relevant events and features in the low solar corona. Given the limited resources of the PROBA2 microsatellite, the SWAP telescope is designed with various innovative technologies, including an off-axis optical design and a CMOS-APS detector. This article provides reference documentation for users of the SWAP image data.

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arXiv2012

Low-Altitude Reconnection Inflow-Outflow Observations during a 2010 November 3 Solar Eruption

For a solar flare occurring on 2010 November 3, we present observations using several SDO/AIA extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) passbands of an erupting flux rope followed by inflows sweeping into a current sheet region. The inflows are soon followed by outflows appearing to originate from near the termination point of the inflowing motion - an observation in line with standard magnetic reconnection models. We measure average inflow plane-of-sky speeds to range from ~150-690 km/s with the initial, high-temperature inflows being the fastest. Using the inflow speeds and a range of Alfven speeds, we estimate the Alfvenic Mach number which appears to decrease with time. We also provide inflow and outflow times with respect to RHESSI count rates and find that the fast, high-temperature inflows occur simultaneously with a peak in the RHESSI thermal lightcurve. Five candidate inflow-outflow pairs are identified with no more than a minute delay between detections. The inflow speeds of these pairs are measured to be 10^2 km/s with outflow speeds ranging from 10^2-10^3 km/s - indicating acceleration during the reconnection process. The fastest of these outflows are in the form of apparently traveling density enhancements along the legs of the loops rather than the loop apexes themselves. These flows could either be accelerated plasma, shocks, or waves prompted by reconnection. The measurements presented here show an order of magnitude difference between the retraction speeds of the loops and the speed of the density enhancements within the loops - presumably exiting the reconnection site.

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arXiv2012

Study of a Prominence Eruption using PROBA2/SWAP and STEREO/EUVI Data

Observations of the early rise and propagation phases of solar eruptive prominences can provide clues about the forces acting on them through the behavior of their acceleration with height. We have analyzed such an event, observed on 13 April 2010 by SWAP on PROBA2 and EUVI on STEREO. A feature at the top of the erupting prominence was identified and tracked in images from the three spacecraft. The triangulation technique was used to derive the true direction of propagation of this feature. The reconstructed points were fitted with two mathematical models: i) a power-law polynomial function and ii) a cubic smoothing spline, in order to derive the accelerations. The first model is characterized by five degrees of freedom while the second one is characterized by ten degrees of freedom. The results show that the acceleration increases smoothly and it is continuously increasing with height. We conclude that the prominence is not accelerated immediately by local reconnection but rather is swept away as part of a large-scale relaxation of the coronal magnetic field.

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arXiv2012

Asymmetric Magnetic Reconnection in Solar Flare and Coronal Mass Ejection Current Sheets

We present two-dimensional resistive magnetohydrodynamic simulations of line-tied asymmetric magnetic reconnection in the context of solar flare and coronal mass ejection current sheets. The reconnection process is made asymmetric along the inflow direction by allowing the initial upstream magnetic field strengths and densities to differ, and along the outflow direction by placing the initial perturbation near a conducting wall boundary that represents the photosphere. When the upstream magnetic fields are asymmetric, the post-flare loop structure is distorted into a characteristic skewed candle flame shape. The simulations can thus be used to provide constraints on the reconnection asymmetry in post-flare loops. More hard X-ray emission is expected to occur at the footpoint on the weak magnetic field side because energetic particles are more likely to escape the magnetic mirror there than at the strong magnetic field footpoint. The footpoint on the weak magnetic field side is predicted to move more quickly because of the requirement in two dimensions that equal amounts of flux must be reconnected from each upstream region. The X-line drifts away from the conducting wall in all simulations with asymmetric outflow and into the strong magnetic field region during most of the simulations with asymmetric inflow. There is net plasma flow across the X-line for both the inflow and outflow directions. The reconnection exhaust directed away from the obstructing wall is significantly faster than the exhaust directed towards it. The asymmetric inflow condition allows net vorticity in the rising outflow plasmoid which would appear as rolling motions about the flux rope axis.

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arXiv2012

Time delays in quasi-periodic pulsations observed during the X2.2 solar flare on 2011 February 15

We report observations of quasi-periodic pulsations (QPPs) during the X2.2 flare of 2011 February 15, observed simultaneously in several wavebands. We focus on fluctuations on time scale 1-30 s and find different time lags between different wavebands. During the impulsive phase, the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) channels in the range 25-100 keV lead all the other channels. They are followed by the Nobeyama RadioPolarimeters at 9 and 17 GHz and the Extreme Ultra-Violet (EUV) channels of the Euv SpectroPhotometer (ESP) onboard the Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO). The Zirconium and Aluminum filter channels of the Large Yield Radiometer (LYRA) onboard the Project for On-Board Autonomy (PROBA2) satellite and the SXR channel of ESP follow. The largest lags occur in observations from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES), where the channel at 1-8 Å leads the 0.5-4 Å channel by several seconds. The time lags between the first and last channels is up to 9 s. We identified at least two distinct time intervals during the flare impulsive phase, during which the QPPs were associated with two different sources in the Nobeyama RadioHeliograph at 17 GHz. The radio as well as the hard X-ray channels showed different lags during these two intervals. To our knowledge, this is the first time that time lags are reported between EUV and SXR fluctuations on these time scales. We discuss possible emission mechanisms and interpretations, including flare electron trapping.

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