Since the times immemorial, Sun had always been the most fascinating and important celestial object for humans. We have reached to all the originally held nine planets of this Solar System, but still don’t have enough information about our own star.
NASA’s STEREO-A or Solar Terrestrial RElations Observatory-Ahead has captured an image of the other side of the Sun on July 15 2015, with Extreme UV Imager. This image shows the Sun in blue because it is in a wavelength of 171 Angstroms.
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STEREO is NASA’s program to capture the far side of the Sun that has never been visible before. As the Sun rotates every 25 days, and the Earth revolves around the Sun, we could not sync and get the information on the other side of the Sun ever.
STEREO spacecrafts ( Ahead and Behind) were launched on October 26, 2006, and using Moon’s gravitational force as slingshot both the spacecraft’s now revolve around the Sun in different orbits with their spacecraft/Sun/Earth angle changing continuously to get behind the Sun.
Over all these years, the spacecrafts and the Earth got out of sync, and now STEREO-A is on the other side of the Sun. STEREO-A reached the far side of the Sun on March 24. The first images were received on July 11.
The STEREO-A had gone on a 3-month slumber from March 24 to July 8 as the transmission was interfered due to solar activity. The spacecraft operated in the safe mode all this time.
The STEREO spacecrafts enable us to study stereoscopic images of the Sun and study various phenomenons such a coronal mass ejections.
Source: NASA
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