NSSDCA ID: 1973-027A-11
Mission Name: SkylabThis experiment, located in the ATM, was designed to record photographically the line spectra of the solar chromosphere and part of the transition region. For stray light elimination, a predisperser grating assembly with two gratings generated a light beam containing only the desired wavelength regions. The main grating was a concave mirror ruled at 600 grooves per mm. The spectrum from 970 to 3940 A was covered in two bands with a spectral resolution of between 0.04 and 0.08 A and a spatial resolution of about 3 arc-s. The entrance slit admitted light from a 2- by 60-arc-s area on the sun. Several operational modes could be selected by the crew members, such as the boresight mode that permitted an astronaut to point at a specific area on the solar disk, the limb scanning mode that produced a sequence of exposures across the limb by stepwise angular motion of the primary mirror, and the flare mode in which the instrument took a preprogrammed series of exposures of flares or other active areas when commanded by a crew member. Data were recorded on strips of film, with eight frames being recorded on each film strip. Included in this package was an XUV monitor, which provided a real-time video image of the chromosphere and corona from sun center to two solar radii over the entire passband of 170 to 550 A, with no spectral resolution and 10- to 20-arc-s spatial resolution. Data from the XUV monitor were available to the crew and were transmitted to the ground over an S-band video channel. For more details, see J.-D. F. Bartoe et al., App. Opt., v. 16, p. 79, 1977.
Questions and comments about this experiment can be directed to: Coordinated Request and User Support Office
Name | Role | Original Affiliation | |
---|---|---|---|
Dr. James D. Purcell | Other Investigator | US Naval Research Laboratory | |
Dr. Richard Tousey | Principal Investigator | US Naval Research Laboratory |