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B.V. Jackson, P.P. Hick (CASS/UCSD)
In the near future white-light, all-sky imagery of the heliosphere will become available from instruments such as the Air Force/NASA Solar Mass Ejection Imager (SMEI), and all-sky cameras as currently included in the instrument complement of the NASA Solar Probe and Solar Polar Sail missions and the ESA Solar Orbiter mission. To optimize the information available from these instruments, their 2-dimensional sky images need to be interpreted in three dimensions. We have developed a Computer Assisted Tomography (CAT) program that modifies a time-segmented three-dimensional kinematic heliospheric model to fit Thomson scattering observations and is designed specifically with observations from the above instrumentation in mind. Here we apply this technique to the Helios spacecraft photometer observations. The tomography program iteratively changes these models to least-squares fit observed global brightness data. The short time intervals of the kinematic modeling impose the restriction that the reconstructions primarily use outward solar wind motion to give perspective views of each point in space accessible to the observations. We plot these models as density Carrington maps and remote observer views for the Helios data sets. The results to date are commensurate with the observational coverage, temporal and spatial resolution, and signal to noise available from the original data. At solar maximum, the Helios photometer data show significant CME activity in the form of dense transient structures at all heliographic latitudes. We explore the location of these dense structures with respect to the heliospheric current sheet and regions of activity on the solar surface.
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The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: bvjackson@ucsd.edu