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The Surprising True Size of Sun’s Atmosphere Calculated
Saturday, June 28, 2014 11:46
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Excerpt from ca.news.yahoo.com
The sun’s volatile atmosphere is even bigger than expected, a NASA spacecraft revealed through observations of gigantic waves.
While the sun itself is 864,938 miles (1.392 million kilometers) wide, NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, or STEREO, found that the solar atmosphere, known as the corona, stretches 5 million miles (8 million km) above the sun’s surface.
NASA officials say the findings will help researchers prepare for the space agency’s Solar Probe Plus mission, scheduled to launch in 2018. That mission will send a spacecraft closer to the sun that any man-made object has ever ventured — within 4 million miles (6.4 million km) of the sun’s surface. Now, scientists know the probe will actually be traveling through the corona during its historic trip.
Source: http://www.ascensionearth2012.org/2014/06/the-surprising-true-size-of-suns.html
