NASA's Hi-C Telescope, Five Times Stronger than AIA, Captures Images of Sun's Corona

NASA's High Resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C) was in charge of capturing high-resolution images of the sun's corona on July 11, 2011.

The images display the solar activity taking place on the Sun's surface to such a high level of detail that it has already been named the highest-resolution images ever taken of the sun's corona.

The images taken by the Hi-C, which was launched on a sounding rocket in White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, focused on an active region of the sun, according to NASA. Out of the rocket's ten-minute flight, the images were actually obtained during about half of the time but still captured invaluable shots.

According to CapitalColumn, scientist Leon Golub of the Harvard-Smith Center for Astrophysics said, "Even though this mission was only a few minutes long, it marks a big breakthrough in coronal studies."

Hi-C is an innovative telescope and it will help scientists further study the solar atmospheres behavior and how this influences the Earth.

The telescope is five times more detailed than the AIA, the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, mounted on the Solar Dynamics Observatory which was launched by NASA in 2010 to observe the sun.

The AIA can scan the sun's surface with a clarity of 675 miles while the Hi-C can is more meticulous, able to observe the surface down to 135 miles.

The following are images taken by the next-generation suborbital space telescope:

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