Seminar April 1, 2005

High-Resolution Views of the Solar Atmosphere
Angelos Vourlidas, NRL

Our quest for understanding the nature and variability of the solar atmosphere
(e.g., coronal heating) has persistently shown the need for observations at ever
smaller scales. So what do we see at subarcsecond scales? Here I report on the
results from the NRL sounding rocket payload, the Very Advanced ULtraviolet
Telescope (VAULT). In two successful flights, the instrument achieved 0.33
arcsecond resolution, the highest so far from a space platform. VAULT obtained
spectrally pure images of the upper chromosphere/lower transition region in the
Lya line (1216A). A number of space-borne and ground-based observatories
supported the VAULT flights. A summary of the results from the joint analysis of
these datasets will be presented.