NASA's IRIS Telescope Opens its Doors and Snaps the Sun's Atmosphere in Unprecedented Detail

A new NASA telescope has scientists excited as it offers an unprecedented view at the seldom-seen atmosphere of the sun.

An international group of researchers and engineers helped open the doors on NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) telescope orbiting Earth, July 17. The telescope then snapped some fine photographs of the sun's atmosphere, revealing neighboring loops of different temperatures and densities. With this kind of detail, the astronomers are hoping to learn more about how the sun's magnetic field plays a role in energizing the star, allowing for the upper layer of the atmosphere, the corona, to reach temperatures of more than 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit.

"The quality of images and spectra we are receiving from IRIS is amazing. This is just what we were hoping for," said Alan Title, IRIS principal investigator at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, Calif. "There is much work ahead to understand what we're seeing, but the quality of the data will enable us to do that."

IRIS, built by Lockheed Martin, is made up of two components, an ultraviolet telescope and a spectrograph. The ultraviolet telescope can capture areas of the sun as small as 150 miles across, which when combined with data from the spectrograph, is one of the best lenses scientists have for looking at the sun.

"These beautiful images from IRIS are going to help us understand how the sun's lower atmosphere might power a host of events around the sun," explained Adrian Daw, the mission scientist for IRIS at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Anytime you look at something in more detail than has ever been seen before, it opens up new doors to understanding. There's always that potential element of surprise."