Perihelion 22 occurred at 11:41 UT on December 24, 2024, at a record breaking heliocentric distance of approx. 0.046 au, or 9.86 solar radii. This was the first perihelion to reach this distance and cross more deeply into sub-alfvenic wind than ever before. As such, this perihelion was historic. The perihelion occurred with the spacecraft in the earthward-facing part of the Sun prior to perihelion and with both Solar Orbiter and STEREO-A spacecraft observing the Sun along similar longitudes. The respective heliocentric distances were 0.95 AU (Solar Orbiter) and 0.97 AU (Stereo-A). The PSP spacecraft footpoint was expected to dash across the solar disk from the eastern to the western limb inbound and disappear beyond the western limb a few hours after perihelion, at about 18:00 UT on December 24, and spend spend its first 9.86Rs perihelion in quadrature with the Earth. From December 21 onward, the spacecraft was closer than 40 Rsun. Therefore, the Parker footpoint prediction team issued daily source predictions on December 21 - 24 for joint studies with other spacecraft data. Footpoint predictions included updates of the likelihood of flare and CME activity from currently visible active regions based on the CCMC flare and CME Scoreboards, respectively, although the current SDO data outage impacted our flare prediction capability.
If you have observational results to share, please contact us at whpi_help@hao.ucar.edu.
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