The IMaX polarimeter for the solar telescope SUNRISE of the NASA long duration balloon program

摘要

On June 8th 2009 the SUNRISE mission was successfully launched. This mission consisted of a 1m aperture solar telescope on board of a stratospheric balloon within the Long Duration Balloon NASA program. The flight followed the foreseen circumpolar trajectory over the Artic and the duration was 5 days and 17 hours. One of the two postfocal instruments onboard was IMaX, the Imaging Magnetograph eXperiment. This instrument is a solar magnetograph which is a diffraction limited imager capable to resolve 100 km on the solar surface, and simultaneously a high sensitivity polarimeter (-3) and a high resolution spectrograph (bandwidth 3 etalon as tunable spectral filter are remarkable. Currently the data obtained is being analyzed and the preliminary results show unprecedented information about the solar dynamics.