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Plasma Composition Measurements in an Active Region from Solar Orbiter/SPICE and Hinode/EIS

Brooks, David H; Janvier, Miho; Baker, Deborah; Warren, Harry P; Auchère, Frédéric; Carlsson, Mats; Fludra, Andrzej; ... Young, Peter R; + view all (2022) Plasma Composition Measurements in an Active Region from Solar Orbiter/SPICE and Hinode/EIS. The Astrophysical Journal , 940 (1) , Article 66. 10.3847/1538-4357/ac9b0b. Green open access

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Abstract

A key goal of the Solar Orbiter mission is to connect elemental abundance measurements of the solar wind enveloping the spacecraft with extreme-UV (EUV) spectroscopic observations of their solar sources, but this is not an easy exercise. Observations from previous missions have revealed a highly complex picture of spatial and temporal variations of elemental abundances in the solar corona. We have used coordinated observations from Hinode and Solar Orbiter to attempt new abundance measurements with the Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instrument, and benchmark them against standard analyses from the EUV Imaging Spectrometer (EIS). We use observations of several solar features in active region (AR) 12781 taken from an Earth-facing view by EIS on 2020 November 10, and SPICE data obtained one week later on 2020 November 17, when the AR had rotated into the Solar Orbiter field of view. We identify a range of spectral lines that are useful for determining the transition region and low-coronal-temperature structure with SPICE, and demonstrate that SPICE measurements are able to differentiate between photospheric and coronal magnesium/neon abundances. The combination of SPICE and EIS is able to establish the atmospheric composition structure of a fan loop/outflow area at the AR edge. We also discuss the problem of resolving the degree of elemental fractionation with SPICE, which is more challenging without further constraints on the temperature structure, and comment on what that can tell us about the sources of the solar wind and solar energetic particles.

Type: Article
Title: Plasma Composition Measurements in an Active Region from Solar Orbiter/SPICE and Hinode/EIS
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ac9b0b
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357%2Fac9b0b
Language: English
Additional information: © 2022 IOP Publishing. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Space and Climate Physics
URI: https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10161302
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