Encounter 18 Summary

This animation shows all L3 WISPR full-field observations from the eighteenth PSP Mission Encounter (2023-12-24 - 2024-01-09). We have superimposed a grid showing helioprojective longitude and latitude, and a scale representation of the size and location of the Sun in the observations using the SDO/HMI Carrington map for this time period. The velocity and distance metrics displayed on the movies correspond respectively to the spacecraft's heliocentric velocity in kilometers per second, and its distance from the Sun's center in units of solar radii (where 1 solar radius = 695,700km). The "FOV Range" label provides the plane-of-sky distance limits of the inner and outermost edges of the fields of view, in units of solar radii. The horizontal blue line indicates the orbital plane of PSP. The timespan of this composite movie covers only the nominal science window when the spacecraft was within 0.25 au; a limited amount of data outside of this range may be available at the below links.
You can download this movie directly as an 99MB mp4 file. This sequence is also available as a 653 MB mp4 file processed via the LW Algorithm developed by Dr. Guillermo Stenborg (JHUAPL) and detailed in Appendix A of Howard et al. 2022 (ApJ, 936, id.43. DOI 10.3847/1538-4357/ac7ff5). Team contact information can be found in Section 1.2 of the WISPR User's Guide [PDF link].

[Credit: NASA/NRL/JHUAPL. Movie processed/compiled by Guillermo Stenborg (JHUAPL) and Karl Battams (NRL). SDO inset courtesy of NASA/SDO and the AIA, EVE, and HMI science teams.]