NASA’s CODEX captures unique views of Sun’s outer atmosphere

NASA’s Coronal Diagnostic Experiment, or CODEX, has just delivered its first images — and they’re stunning! Mounted on the exterior of the International Space Station, CODEX is a solar coronagraph designed to block out bright light from the Sun to reveal our star’s outer atmosphere, or corona.This mission gives scientists an unprecedented look at solar dynamics right from low Earth orbit. Watch the video to see these amazing images and find out what makes CODEX so unique! Credit: Video Credit: NASA/Beth Anthony Music Credit: “Aglow and Just So – Instrumental” by Jay Price [PRS] via Universal Production Music Sound Effects: pixabay.com Additional Graphics: vecteezy.com

NASA missions use coronagraphs to study the Sun in various ways, but that doesn’t mean they all see the same thing. Coronagraphs on the joint NASA-ESA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) mission look at visible light from the solar corona with both a wide field of view and a smaller one. The CODEX instrument’s field of view is somewhere in the middle, but looks at blue light to understand temperature and speed variations in the background solar wind.In this composite image of overlapping s Credit: NASA/ESA/SOHO/KASI/INAF/CODEX