Bibcode
Kano, Ryouhei; Bando, Takamasa; Narukage, Noriyuki; Ishikawa, Ryoko; Tsuneta, Saku; Katsukawa, Yukio; Kubo, Masahito; Ishikawa, Shin-nosuke; Hara, Hirohisa; Shimizu, Toshifumi; Suematsu, Yoshinori; Ichimoto, Kiyoshi; Sakao, Taro; Goto, Motoshi; Kato, Yoshiaki; Imada, Shinsuke; Kobayashi, Ken; Holloway, Todd; Winebarger, Amy; Cirtain, Jonathan; De Pontieu, Bart; Casini, Roberto; Trujillo-Bueno, J.; Štepán, Jiří; Manso-Sainz, R.; Belluzzi, L.; Asensio-Ramos, A.; Auchère, Frédéric; Carlsson, Mats
Bibliographical reference
Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2012: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray. Proceedings of the SPIE, Volume 8443, id. 84434F-84434F-17 (2012).
Advertised on:
9
2012
Citations
44
Refereed citations
36
Description
One of the biggest challenges in heliophysics is to decipher the
magnetic structure of the solar chromosphere. The importance of
measuring the chromospheric magnetic field is due to both the key role
the chromosphere plays in energizing and structuring the outer solar
atmosphere and the inability of extrapolation of photospheric fields to
adequately describe this key boundary region. Over the last few years,
significant progress has been made in the spectral line formation of UV
lines as well as the MHD modeling of the solar atmosphere. It is found
that the Hanle effect in the Lyman-alpha line (121.567 nm) is a most
promising diagnostic tool for weaker magnetic fields in the chromosphere
and transition region. Based on this groundbreaking research, we propose
the Chromospheric Lyman-Alpha Spectro-Polarimeter (CLASP) to NASA as a
sounding rocket experiment, for making the first measurement of the
linear polarization produced by scattering processes and the Hanle
effect in the Lyman-alpha line (121.567 nm), and making the first
exploration of the magnetic field in the upper chromosphere and
transition region of the Sun. The CLASP instrument consists of a
Cassegrain telescope, a rotating 1/2-wave plate, a dual-beam
spectrograph assembly with a grating working as a beam splitter, and an
identical pair of reflective polarization analyzers each equipped with a
CCD camera. We propose to launch CLASP in December 2014.