Solar Soft X-ray irradiance with Yohkoh/SXT


Aki Takeda(MSU) and Nicole Albanese(Tufts Univ.) as a REU project 2018

Project description

The SXT is the soft X-ray telescope belongs to an international solar observing space project, called 'Yohkoh' which means sunshine in Japanese. Montana State University(MSU) is home of Yohkoh Legacy data Archive (YLA), which is the archive of all usable data sets and documents from the Yohkoh mission.

Using SXT data from this archive, we can study solar activity in terms of sun's radiation in solar soft X-rays. In this project, we will process the SXT full-Sun images taken from 1991 to 2001 to derive solar soft X-ray irradiance during this period. We will learn how to handle Yohkoh/SXT FITS data for quantitative analysis: selection of data files and area of interest, derivation of temperature and emission measure, calculation of the SXT irradiance in the physical unit comparable with other instruments. Since the SXT is an imager, we can derive unique spatial variations of irradiance, which have never be obtained with other instruments that only measure the full-Sun integrated flux. We will characterize dependence of the irradiance on solar latitudes, or its association with particular solar structures, etc.

As a bonus, we will have a few opportunities to watch and learn how an international satellite project like Yohkoh is operated. MSU is participating the operation of Hinode/XRT, which is a succeeding project of Yohkoh/SXT. We will have two duty weeks of Hinode/XRT operation in July and August in which we actually take control of the XRT observation.

Weekly goals

Nicole's presentation file.
Nicole's draft paper.

Beyond this project

Resources



Aki Takeda (Research Scientist, Dept. of Physics at MSU)