Berghmans, David ; D'Huys, Elke ; Zhukov, Andrei ; Auchère, Frédéric

Talk presented at AGU Fall Meeting 2019, San Francisco (US) on 2019-12-09

Abstract: SWAP is a small coronal EUV imager onboard the ESA microsatellite PROBA2. Thanks to its large field of view (54 arcmin), spacecraft offpoints and applied image processing, SWAP has been able to show the structures of the EUV corona more than 1 Rsun above the limb. This "middle corona" is in between the classical off limb EUV corona as seen by e.g. SDO/AIA and the much further white light corona as seen by e.g. the LASCO coronagraphs and is thus a poorly observed region. The Middle Corona harbours interesting physics, as it is here where the solar wind accelerates and the topology of streamers and pseudo-streamers fade in the solar wind.SWAP imagery has shown how 'coronal fan' structures in the middle corona survive many solar rotations and how the extended corona above the solar poles reverses polarity. The Full Sun Imager (FSI, part of Extreme Ultraviolet Imager EUI onboard Solar Orbiter) will take this further with a field of view of 228 arcmin. Furthermore, as embarked on the Solar Orbiter mission (launch 2020) FSI will be the first to image all this from out of the ecliptic. In this paper we will review the Middle Corona results of SWAP and provide an outlook on what to expect from EUI/FSI.

Keyword(s): PROBA2 ; SWAP ; Solar Orbiter ; EUI
Note: SH13A-01 session