The Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS)

By Bart De Pontieu, A. Title, J. Lemen, G. Kushner, D. J. Akin, B. Allard, T. Berger, P. Boerner, Mark C. M. Cheung, C. Chou and 78 more. 2012

1,074 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) small explorer spacecraft provides simultaneous spectra and images of the photosphere, chromosphere, transition region, and corona with 0.33 – 0.4 arcsec spatial resolution, two-second temporal resolution, and 1 km s−1 velocity resolution over a field-of-view of up to 175 arcsec × 175 arcsec. IRIS was launched into a Sun-synchronous orbit on 27 June 2013 using a Pegasus-XL rocket and consists of a 19-cm UV telescope that feeds a slit-based dual-bandpass imaging spectrograph. IRIS obtains spectra in passbands from 1332 – 1358 Å, 1389 – 1407 Å, and 2783 – 2834 Å, including bright spectral lines formed in the chromosphere (Mg ii h 2803 Å and Mg ii k 2796 Å) and transition region (C ii 1334/1335 Å and Si iv 1394/1403 Å). Slit-jaw images in four different passbands (C ii 1330, Si iv 1400, Mg ii k 2796, and Mg ii wing 2830 Å) can be taken simultaneously with spectral rasters that sample regions up to 130 arcsec × 175 arcsec at a variety of spatial samplings (from 0.33 arcsec and up). IRIS is sensitive to emission from plasma at temperatures between 5000 K and 10 MK and will advance our understanding of the flow of mass and energy through an interface region, formed by the chromosphere and transition region, between the photosphere and corona. This highly structured and dynamic region not only acts as the conduit of all mass and energy feeding into the corona and solar wind, it also requires an order of magnitude more energy to heat than the corona and solar wind combined. The IRIS investigation includes a strong numerical modeling component based on advanced radiative–MHD codes to facilitate interpretation of observations of this complex region. Approximately eight Gbytes of data (after compression) are acquired by IRIS each day and made available for unrestricted use within a few days of the observation.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/75915e1d9810e29c90b58dc1ed6fd242ded06a72

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Citations in the corpus

Multiwavelength Studies of MHD Waves in the Solar Chromosphere (2015, background): “Then, as these waves bombard the transition region interface, state-of-the-art space-borne satellites, such as IRIS (De Pontieu et al. 2014), will allow the spectroscopic signatures (including thermal widths, shock waves and rebound characteristics) to be fully investigated at the precise location…”
CHIANTI - An atomic database for Emission Lines. Version 8 (2015, background): “C ii produces a number of strong emission lines in the UV, including the 2s2 2p 2PJ–2s 2p2 2DJ′ multiplet found between 1334.5 and 1335.7 Å that is routinely observed by the recentlylaunched IRIS instrument (De Pontieu et al. 2014).”
Oscillations and Waves in Sunspots (2015, background): “In the upper layers, instruments like SMM (Gurman et al., 1982), SUMER onboard SOHO (Wilhelm et al., 1997) and the recently launched IRIS (De Pontieu et al., 2014) have made possible the observation of emission spectra of ultraviolet lines formed in the high chromosphere, transition region and low…”
The SunPy Project: Open Source Development and Status of the Version 1.0 Core Package (2020, methodology): “The IRISPy package provides tools to read, manipulate, and visualize data from IRIS (De Pontieu et al. 2014).”
Advances in Observing Various Coronal EUV Waves in the SDO Era and Their Seismological Applications (Invited Review) (2014, neutral): “The Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS: De Pontieu et al., 2014), launched in June 2013, can detect potential UV signatures of coronal waves and Moreton waves in the transition region and chromosphere, such as Doppler, density, and temperature perturbations, and help identify the origin of…”
The Solar Orbiter EUI instrument: The Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (2020, background): “VAULT observations of an individual spicule (Chintzoglou et al. 2018) combined with IRIS (De Pontieu et al. 2014) data showed the spicule as a moving heating front without the need to assume any mass flow.”
A publicly available simulation of an enhanced network region of the Sun (2015, methodology): “…observations with high spatial and temporal resolution from the NASA Small Explorer satellite Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS, De Pontieu et al. 2014b), we feel that it is crucial to use detailed numerical simulations, like the one presented here, in order to improve our…”