'It's an exciting time to be a solar physicist,' said Valentin Pillet, director of the National Solar Observatory.
"These are the most detailed images of the sun ever taken," Claire Raftery, a spokesperson from the NSF's National Solar Observatory —which built and operates the telescope—told."They show features as small as 30 kilometers [19 miles]. For comparison, the previous largest publicly funded solar telescope could see features 160 kilometers in size, so that is more than a factor of five better.
The primary mirror of the Inouye Solar Telescope—based on the 10,000-foot-high summit of Haleakala—is the secret to its power, in addition to the state-of-the-art instrumentation that has been incorporated into the facility. "It's an exciting time to be a solar physicist," Valentin Pillet, director of the NSO, said in a statement."The Inouye Solar Telescope will provide remote sensing of the outer layers of the sun and the magnetic processes that occur in them. These processes propagate into the solar system where the Parker Solar Probe and Solar Orbiter missions will measure their consequences.
"On Earth, we can predict if it is going to rain pretty much anywhere in the world very accurately, and space weather just isn't there yet," Matt Mountain, president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy—which manages the Inouye Solar Telescope—said in a statement.
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