Preliminary three‐dimensional analysis of the heliospheric response to the 28 October 2003 CME using SMEI white‐light observations

[1] The Solar Mass Ejection Imager (SMEI) has recorded the inner heliospheric response in white-light Thomson scattering to the 28 October 2003 coronal mass ejection (CME). This preliminary report shows the evolution of this particular event in SMEI observations, as we track it from a first measurement at approximately 20° elongation (angular distance) from the solar disk until it fades in the antisolar hemisphere in the SMEI 180° field of view. The large angle and spectrometric coronagraph (LASCO) images show a CME and an underlying bright ejection of coronal material that is associated with an erupting prominence. Both of these are seen by SMEI in the interplanetary medium. We employ a three-dimensional (3-D) reconstruction technique that derives its perspective views from outward flowing solar wind to reveal the shape and extent of the CME. This is accomplished by iteratively fitting the parameters of a kinematic solar wind density model to both SMEI white-light observations and Solar-Terrestrial Environment Laboratory (STELab), interplanetary scintillation (IPS) velocity data. This modeling technique separates the true heliospheric signal in SMEI observations from background noise and reconstructs the 3-D heliospheric structure as a function of time. These reconstructions allow separation of the 28 October CME from other nearby heliospheric structure and a determination of its mass. The present results are the first utilizing this type of 3-D reconstruction with the SMEI data. We determine an excess-over-ambient mass for the southward moving ejecta associated with the prominence material of 7.1 × 1016 g and a total mass of 8.9 × 1016 g. Preliminary SMEI white-light calibration indicates that the total mass of this CME including possible associated nearby structures may have been as much as ∼2.0 × 1017 g spread over much of the earthward facing hemisphere.

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