NSF Award
2231658
In August of 2017, the Great American Eclipse traversed the continental United States from Oregon to South Carolina. The Citizen Continental-America Telescopic Eclipse (Citizen CATE) successfully deployed over 300 volunteer citizen scientists at 68 sites to continuously observe totality from coast to coast. That effort resulted in a novel and unique dataset containing 90 minutes of continuous coverage of the inner solar corona. On April 8, 2024, a total solar eclipse (TSE) will again traverse United States, this time from Texas to Maine. The project outlined here is to build on the successes of CATE 2017 and improve the observations with upgraded instrumentation to include a larger-format camera and polarization measurements, providing a wider field of view and diagnostic of coronal density not previously possible. CATE 2024 project will deploy 40 teams of citizen scientists along the path of totality to collect over 60 minutes of high-resolution data, which will be used to study the hard to observe middle corona. Previous planning work including site selection, identification of necessary equipment, and initial development of the citizen science network has already been carried out. This project will begin the implementation of the planned activities, which includes equipment purchase and telescope building; training on equipment and in solar astronomy for citizen science teams that will train teams within their regions; and implementing software upgrades to ensure consistency in data collection. Practice with the equipment for the citizen science training teams includes a workshop to be held at the Southwest Research Institute campus and travel to Australia for the April 2023 total solar eclipse. The project’s broader societal impact includes engagement with Native American and other underrepresented community groups along the eclipse path and the donation of telescopes to community groups for their use after the eclipse. <br/><br/>CATE 2024 will use high-cadence high dynamic range (HDR) polarimetric observations of the corona to characterize the physical processes that shape the heating, structure, and evolution of the solar corona at scales that cannot be studied outside of a TSE. The science objectives of CATE 2024 are to (1) determine the connectivity of structures that span the middle corona, where the coronal magnetic field transitions from primarily closed to primarily open; (2) measure the flow of the nascent solar wind, by characterizing small scale dynamics that occur during the eclipse; and (3) identify and characterize magnetic reconnection, which is believed to generate structure in the solar wind and to heat the low and middle corona, by identifying features and dynamics related to this process.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
