Abstract
The third flight of the High-Resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C 2.1) occurred on May 29, 2018; the Sounding Rocket was launched from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The instrument has been modified from its original configuration (Hi-C 1) to observe the solar corona in a passband that peaks near 172 Å, and uses a new, custom-built low-noise camera. The instrument targeted Active Region 12712, and captured 78 images at a cadence of 4.4 s (18:56:22 – 19:01:57 UT; 5 min and 35 s observing time). The image spatial resolution varies due to quasi-periodic motion blur from the rocket; sharp images contain resolved features of at least 0.47 arcsec. There are coordinated observations from multiple ground- and space-based telescopes providing an unprecedented opportunity to observe the mass and energy coupling between the chromosphere and the corona. Details of the instrument and the data set are presented in this paper.
Highlights
The High-resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C) has been launched three times from White Sands Missile Range (WSMR)
Hi-C is composed of an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) telescope, a CCD camera, and a context telescope contained in a standard NASA 22-inch diameter rocket shell
As with most solar EUV telescopes, the passband is selected through a combination of a filter that blocks most of the solar light and heat from entering the telescope, and a multilayer coating on the optical surfaces that only reflects a narrow range of wavelengths
Summary
The High-resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C) has been launched three times from White Sands Missile Range (WSMR). Following the success of the first flight, Hi-C was modified to observe in a different wavelength to study the mass and energy coupling between the chromosphere and the corona (Hi-C 2) For this objective, the wavelength of the passband was changed to 172 Å (Fe IX/X; see Sections 2.5 and 2.6, and Figure 2) and a new custom-built, low-noise camera was installed (see Section 2.3). Features that may be the coronal counterparts to type-II spicules were seen in Hi-C 1 data (Régnier et al, 2014) and IRIS and SDO/AIA data (De Pontieu et al, 2017), but cospatial and co-temporal high-resolution observations of the chromosphere, transition region and corona are needed to determine the correlation. We present the details of the Hi-C 2.1 instrument, as well as flight and data performance
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