Pic of the Week: WISPR and Solar Winds

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): View of the Sun’s solar winds as captured by the Parker Solar Probe’s WISPR instrument during its record-breaking flyby of the sun on December 25, 2024. (NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Lab)

This week’s image is from the Wide-Field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR) aboard NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which was launched in 2018 to observe the Sun. It shows the solar winds in the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona. The probe was about 3.8 million miles away from the Sun’s surface.

Here is a little more from NASA regarding the image:

The new WISPR images reveal the corona and solar wind, a constant stream of electrically charged particles from the Sun that rage across the solar system. The solar wind expands throughout of the solar system with wide-ranging effects. Together with outbursts of material and magnetic currents from the Sun, it helps generate auroras, strip planetary atmospheres, and induce electric currents that can overwhelm power grids and affect communications at Earth. Understanding the impact of solar wind starts with understanding its origins at the Sun.

The WISPR images give scientists a closer look at what happens to the solar wind shortly after it is released from the corona. The images show the important boundary where the Sun’s magnetic field direction switches from northward to southward, called the heliospheric current sheet. It also captures the collision of multiple coronal mass ejections, or CMEs — large outbursts of charged particles that are a key driver of space weather — for the first time in high resolution.

Check out this helpful video from NASA describing the mission of the Parker Solar Probe.