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March 20, 2013
STEREO Watches the Sun Blast Comet PanSTARRS
This movie from the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) shows comet PanSTARRS as it moved around the sun from March 10-15,2013 (repeated three times). The images were captured by the Heliospheric Imager (HI), an instrument that looks to the side of the sun to watch coronal mass ejections (CMEs) as they travel toward Earth, which is the unmoving bright orb on the right. The bright light on the left comes from the sun and the bursts from the left represent the solar material erupting off the sun in a CME. While it appears from STEREO’s point of view that the CME passes right by the comet, the two are not lying in the same plane, which scientists know since the comet’s tail didn’t move or change in response to the CME’s passage.
(Click on the image for enlarge)
Images above: Triptych made from three images of STEREO Behind's view of Comet PanSTARRS.
Still from STEREO Behind's Cor2 instrument showing the March 15, 2013 coronal mass ejection, or CME.
Multimedia items related to this story: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?11226
Images, Videos, Text, Credits: ESA / NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
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