The First Focused Hard X-ray Images of the Sun with NuSTAR
- Creators
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Grefenstette, Brian W.
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Glesener, Lindsay
- Krucker, Säm
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Hudson, Hugh
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Hannah, Iain G.
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Smith, David M.
- Vogel, Julia K.
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White, Stephen M.
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Madsen, Kristin K.
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Marsh, Andrew J.
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Caspi, Amir
- Chen, Bin
- Shih, Albert
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Kuhar, Matej
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Boggs, Steven E.
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Christensen, Finn E.
- Craig, William W.
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Forster, Karl
- Hailey, Charles J.
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Harrison, Fiona A.
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Miyasaka, Hiromasa
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Stern, Daniel
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Zhang, William W.
Abstract
We present results from the the first campaign of dedicated solar observations undertaken by the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope ARray (NuSTAR) hard X-ray (HXR) telescope. Designed as an astrophysics mission, NuSTAR nonetheless has the capability of directly imaging the Sun at HXR energies (>3 keV) with an increase in sensitivity of at least two magnitude compared to current non-focusing telescopes. In this paper we describe the scientific areas where NuSTAR will make major improvements on existing solar measurements. We report on the techniques used to observe the Sun with NuSTAR, their limitations and complications, and the procedures developed to optimize solar data quality derived from our experience with the initial solar observations. These first observations are briefly described, including the measurement of the Fe K-shell lines in a decaying X-class flare, HXR emission from high in the solar corona, and full-disk HXR images of the Sun.
Additional Information
© 2016. The American Astronomical Society. Received 2016 January 27. Accepted 2016 May 20. Published 2016 July 18. This work was supported under NASA contract NNG08FD60C and made use of data from the NuSTAR mission, a project led by the California Institute of Technology, managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and funded by NASA. Additional funding for this work was also provided under NASA grants NNX12AJ36G and NNX14AG07G. S.K. acknowledges funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation (200021-140308). A.J.M.'s participation was supported by NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship award NNX13AM41H. Part of this work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. A.C. was supported by NASA grants NNX15AK26G and NNX14AN84G. I.G.H. is supported by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. We thank the NuSTAR Operations, Software and Calibration teams for support with the execution and analysis of these observations. This research made use of the NuSTAR Data Analysis Software (NuSTARDAS), jointly developed by the ASI Science Data Center (ASDC, Italy) and the California Institute of Technology (USA). This research made extensive use of the IDL Astronomy Library (http://idlastro.gsfc.nasa.gov/) and of the SolarSoft IDL distribution (SSW). Additional figures were produced using the Veusz plotting package (© 2003–2015 Jeremy Sanders). Facility: NuSTAR.Attached Files
Published - 2016-43.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 69463
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20160805-091208103
- NNG08FD60C
- NASA
- NASA/JPL/Caltech
- NNX12AJ36G
- NASA
- NNX14AG07G
- NASA
- 200021-140308
- Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
- NNX13AM41H
- NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship
- DE-AC52-07NA27344
- Department of Energy (DOE)
- NNX15AK26G
- NASA
- NNX14AN84G
- NASA
- Royal Society
- Created
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2016-08-09Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-11Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Space Radiation Laboratory, NuSTAR
- Other Numbering System Name
- Space Radiation Laboratory
- Other Numbering System Identifier
- 2016-43