Coronal Spectral Diagnostics: The Coronal Solar Magnetic Observatory (COSMO)

Understanding and predicting the major phenomena taking place in the solar corona, such as flares and Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), the heating and evolution of the solar atmosphere, and the acceleration of the solar wind, are fundamental challenges to predict our own star. These challenges are related to the solar magnetism and to the physical properties of solar plasmas: meeting them requires two types of measurements:

A. Spectrally resolved, simultaneous observations of the entire corona in multiple spectral lines emitted by chromospheric to hot coronal plasmas at high spatial resolution and cadence for long periods of time; and

B. Coronal magnetic field measurements.