IRIS releases new imagery of Mercury transit
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
On May 9, 2016, a NASA solar telescope called the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, observed Mercury crossing in front of the sun – an astronomical phenomenon known as a Mercury transit. This movie shows a composite of the IRIS imagery, in the inset, and imagery from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, as the golden background with a view of Mercury’s transit moving from left to right across the bottom. The thin, dark line that appears in the IRIS imagery is a slit that helps focus incoming light for an instrument called a spectrograph. Lockheed Martin designed the IRIS observatory and manages the mission for NASA. For more on Mercury transit: http://www.nasa.gov/transit
Tags:
- Solar Dynamics Observatory
- Goddard Space Flight Center
- Mercury (planet)
- Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph
- NASA
- Astronomical objects
- Scientific observation
- Observational astronomy
- Space exploration
- Space program of the United States
- Solar System
- Physical sciences
- Space science
- Astronomy
- Outer space
- Science
- Spaceflight
- Bodies of the Solar System