NASA Spacecraft Will Reunite With Earth After 17 Years of Studying the Sun
. The flyby is not only a chance for the spacecraft to reunite with Earth, but also provides a rare opportunity for STEREO-A to collaborate with other NASA missions to view the Sun in new and exciting ways.The STEREO mission actually started off with twin spacecraft: the leading STEREO-A and STEREO-B, which lagged behind. The two spacecraft provided the first stereoscopic, or multiple-perspective, view of the Sun.
“Prior to that we were ‘tethered’ to the Sun-Earth line – we only saw one side of the Sun at a time,” Lika Guhathakurta, STEREO program scientist at NASA, said in a statement. “STEREO broke that tether and gave us a view of the Sun as a three-dimensional object.
The team of scientists behind the STEREO mission are also hoping to test a theory about coronal loops, curved arcs of the magnetic field that pops up through the visible surface of the Sun. “There is a recent idea that coronal loops might just be optical illusions,” Terry Kucera, STEREO project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement. “If you look at them from multiple points of view, [the answer] should become more apparent.
“It’s like the parable about the blind men and the elephant—the one who feels the legs says ‘it’s like a tree trunk,’ and the one who feels the tail says ‘it’s like a snake,’” Toni Galvin, a professor at the University of New Hampshire and principal investigator for one of STEREO-A’s instruments, said in a statement. “That’s what we’re stuck with right now with CMEs, because we typically only have one or two spacecraft right next to each other measuring it.
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