Summary of Flight Results (flight 1995/1996)

In January 1996, the Flare Genesis Experiment was carried for 19 days by a 29.4 million cu.ft helium-filled balloon in the stratosphere above Antarctica, during which over 14000 images of the Sun were recorded. The purpose of the flight was to improve understanding of the mechanisms involved in many different types of solar activity, particularly flares and solar filament eruptions. Achieving this goal demanded the development of a platform for an 80-cm F/1.5 optical telescope that would be stable to 10 arcseconds. The actual staility achieved was 20 arcseconds. Nevertheless, the FGE flight yielded valuable data and validated the engineering design. The flight lasted from 1996 January 7 to 26 - one of the longest flights in Antarctica. An 11-h underflight on January 10 (with 3 h on station) with our Ground Support Equipment (GSE) and antennas aboard an LC-130 aircraft provided a crucial opportunity to test payload performance and compensate for problems that developed after launch.

We have already processed and examined all of the 14,000 FGE images. The images have been flat-fielded, corrected for smearing due to residual jitter, and deconvolved. In 37 h, the FGE obtained the longest uninterrupted, high-resolution record of solar convective flows. We did not record any solar activity (there was none), but future flights will take place nearer solar cycle maximum, when many targets will present themselves.

Co-I Steven Keil has begun analysis of the photospheric proper motions. This quicktime movie shows the first results of his analysis, which attempts to follow the proper motions long enough to reveal the points of convergent motion. This version is based on only 2 h of data. An analyses of the first hour and the second hour separately show the corks following the same pattern. More new science should result as we extend the analysis to the full 37-h interval. We are particularly interested in whether there is a pattern of clockwise or counterclockwise flows that might correspond to the global patterns of magnetic helicity (negative helicity predominates in the North and positive helicity in the South).

We have also produced another quicktime movie of the granulation based upon only a couple of hours of data. Unfortunately, the analysis is made difficult by the huge amounts of data involved: fourteen thousand images, filling over 20GB.

Data Availability