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We'll take images and spectra in the ultraviolet and near-ultraviolet part of the spectrum
of the Sun. That's the type of light that we usually cannot see from the ground, the
Earth's atmosphere absorbs all of that, which is a good thing for us. Otherwise we'd have
really bad sunburn. The ozone layer of the Earth absorbs that light. That's all we need
to do if we want to look at that region on the Sun, the interface region that needs mostly
that type of light. We need to put our telescope above Earth's atmosphere. We do that by launching
satellites, it flies about 400 miles above the Earth's surface. It's not going to fly
to the Sun. It just orbits the Earth's surface. It has a telescope. The telescope takes the
light and that light gets fed into a spectrograph that splits up the light into its colors,
and that light just ends up on a detector camera, kind of like what you have on your
phone, except a little more expensive, and that data gets processed by a computer, downlinks,
to essentially radio, with the ground stations. And then we have the data on our computers.
So what we do with that data is we combine it with data from other observatories, either
other solar satellites that orbit Earth or even some that look at the Sun but look at
different parts of the Sun, and we combine all that information with computer models.
The computer models really help us understand this very complex region where so much of
the solar activity is happening. It's a very complex region and that means that we need
essentially super computers. We use the NASA super computers to model a piece of the Sun
within our computer. We also use ground-based telescopes. These are telescopes that are
usually in the middle of the ocean where there's very nice weather, very stable air and they
allow us to look at different parts of the Sun's atmosphere or the surface of the atmosphere
which drives a lot of the activity higher up. And so a combination of all these facets
of the investigation will allow us to understand how the gases are heated and cooled in this
region.