Stereo Options

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0511/14stereo/


The first spacecraft designed to capture 3-D "stereo" views of the sun and solar wind have been shipped from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Md., for their next round of pre-launch tests.

http://www.stereo.jhuapl.edu/

[edstrick]

It's unfortunate that McNaught was too early for full commissioning of the instruments and for there to be any significant baseline batween the two spacecraft. We'd have 3-d information on the "isochron" bands you can see in the Stereo images that have shown up on the net.

Each isochron striation is the result of an impulsive dust release from an "event" at the nucleus, spreading out along the tail as light pressure sorts fine particles from coarser and coarser particles. Comet West showed such bands spectacularly.