09/30/2011
SMEI data-taking stopped on September 28, 2011. For the current UCSD IPS space weather forecasts, please follow this link.
03/28/2011
Starting in late February, SMEI began to measure the brightening of the eclipsing binary epsilon Aurigae.
SMEI continues to measure the brightness of epsilon Aurigae for the Citizen Sky project.
04/14/2010
Astronomer's Telegram #2558 for The outburst light curve of Nova KT Eridani from Solar Mass Ejection Imager Observations
02/09/2010
Click here to view the latest SMEI difference images
06/26/2008
Click here to view updated data sets including Ecliptic Reconstructions and Daily/Monthly animations of data
11/30/2007
Click here to view movies of Comets C/2001 Q4 (NEAT) and C/2002 T7 (LINEAR)
The Solar Mass Ejection Imager (SMEI) is an all-sky imager consisting of 3 cameras that currently observes the Sun's outer corona and the heliosphere and provide data for modeling the solar wind. SMEI improves our ability to predict when large coronal mass ejections (CMEs) will hit Earth. These large CMEs can damage Earth-orbiting satellites, overload power grids, and disrupt radio communications. SMEI images also provide information for the study of the Sun and other solar system objects such as comets and asteroids.
SMEI was launched to an Earth-terminator, Sun-synchronous, 840 km orbit on 6 January 2003. It is carried aboard the U.S. Air Force's Coriolis spacecraft with the U.S. Navy's WindSat instrument. SMEI is a joint project of the University of California at San Diego, Boston College, the University of Birmingham (UK), and the Air Force Research Laboratory.
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The image to the left shows the three SMEI camera baffles and their data processing unit. |