Big Questions for STEREO
The goal of STEREO is to understand the origin the Sun's coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and their consequences for Earth. The mission consists of two spacecraft, one leading and the other lagging Earth in its orbit. The spacecraft carries instrumentation for solar imaging and for in-situ sampling of the solar wind.
- How and why does the Sun vary and what are the consequences?
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The Sun varies in every way we can observe it. The Sun give off light in the infrared, visible, ultraviolet, and at x-ray energies, and it gives off magnetic field, bulk plasma (the solar wind) and energetic particles moving up to nearly the speed of light, and all of these emissions vary. These variations occur on timescales from fractions of a second to hundreds of years and longer.