High-resolution Solar Polarimetry with Sunrise

Schmidt, W.; Solanki, S. K.; Schüssler, M.; Curdt, W.; Lites, B. W.; Title, A. M.; Martinez Pillet, V.
Bibliographical reference

Astronomische Gesellschaft Abstract Series, Vol. 18., Abstracts of Contributed Talks and Posters presented at the Annual Scientific Meeting of the Astronomische Gesellschaft at the Joint European and National Meeting JENAM 2001 of the European Astronomical Society and the Astronomische Gesellschaft at Munich, September 10-15, 2001, abstract #MS 10 01.

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2001
Number of authors
7
IAC number of authors
1
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
Sunrise is a 1m balloon-borne solar telescope. It is equipped with a spectrograph polarimeter which combines vector-polarimetry in the visible with diagnostic spectroscopy in the visible and the UV, down to 200 nm. The instrumentation includes a filter-magnetograph and a medium-band filtergraph. The wavelength bands of the latter include the CH-band (430.6 nm) and a UV continuum at 205 nm. Diffraction limited resolution in the UV will be achieved by employing a phase diversity technique. The main telescope is based on a lightweight silicon-carbide mirror, developed within the Solar Lite program. During the long-duration flight at Antarctica, foreseen for late 2005, Sunrise will continuously observe the sun for a period of about ten days, with constant image quality across the full field of view. In-flight alignment of the telescope optics will be controlled by a wavefront sensor. The main goal of Sunrise is to understand the structure and dynamics of the magnetic field in the atmosphere of the sun. To this end, Sunrise will observe small magnetic flux concentrations with dimensions of less than 70 km with high polarimetric accuracy. At the same time, Sunrise will provide diffraction-limited filtergrams of the photosphere and chromosphere with a resolution down to 35 km at a wavelength of 200 nm.