Solar Physics Division Meeting 2000, June 19-22
Session 2. Corona, Solar Wind, Flares, CMEs, Solar-stellar, Instrumentation, Other
Display, Chair: J. Krall, Monday-Thursday, June 19, 2000, 8:00am-6:00pm, Forum Ballroom

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[2.98] A dream of a mission: the Stellar Imager and Seismic Probe

C.J. Schrijver (Stanford-Lockheed Institute for Space Research), K.G. Carpenter (Goddard Space Flight Center)

The Stellar Imager and Seismic Probe (SISP) is a mission to understand the various effects of magnetic fields of stars, the dynamos that generate them, and the internal structure and dynamics of the stars in which they exist. The ultimate goal is to achieve the best-possible forecasting of solar activity on times scales ranging up to decades, and an understanding of the impact of stellar magnetic activity on astrobiology and life in the Universe. The road to that goal will revolutionize our understanding of stars and stellar systems, the building blocks of the Universe. SISP represents an advance in image detail of several hundred times over the Hubble Space Telescope. SISP will zoom in on what today - with few exceptions - we only know as point sources, revealing processes never before seen, thus providing a tool to astrophysics as fundamental as the microscope is to the study of life on Earth.

SISP is an ultraviolet aperture-synthesis imager with 8-10 telescopes with meter-class apertures, and a central hub with focal-plane instrumentation that allows spectrophotometry in passbands as narrow as a few Angstroms up to hundreds of Angstroms. SISP will image stars and binaries with one hundred to one thousand resolution elements on their surface, and sound their interiors through asteroseismology to image internal structure, differential rotation, and large-scale circulations; this will provide accurate knowledge of stellar structure and evolution and complex transport processes, and will impact numerous branches of (astro)physics ranging from the Big Bang to the future of the Universe.

Fitting naturally within the NASA long-term time line, SISP complements defined missions, and with them will show us entire other solar systems, from the central star to their orbiting planets.


If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://www.lmsal.com/SISP. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser.

The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: schryver@lmsal.com, kgc@stargate.gsfc.nasa.com

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