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SOHO's ten-year triumph in unmasking the Sun EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY & NASA NEWS RELEASES Posted: December 1, 2005 Thanks to one of the most productive spacecraft ever built, scientists are far better acquainted with the star that lights our world and gives us life. Built for ESA by European industry, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) went into space on December 2, 1995. The tenth anniversary of SOHO's launch is a time for celebration for the scientists and engineers in Europe and the USA who conceived, created and still operate this unprecedented solar spacecraft - and who have rescued it from oblivion three times. Four months after its flawless launch by a NASA rocket, SOHO was at its
special vantage point 1.5 million kilometres away from the sunward side of
Earth. There it watches the Sun unblinkingly 24 hours every day, and sends
home a stream of images of the ceaseless frenzy in the solar atmosphere.
Apart from unmasking the Sun, and teaching us how it works, SOHO's
pictures give early warning of storms in space that can affect astronauts,
satellites and power and communications systems on Earth.
All contact was lost with the spacecraft in June 1998. Dramatic efforts by ESA and NASA engineers, supported by Matra Marconi Space (now Astrium) who built SOHO, restored the spacecraft to full operation in November 1998. Shortly afterwards, the spacecraft's last gyroscope failed, but the teams developed new software that controls the spacecraft without a gyroscope. A third crisis occurred in June 2003, when SOHO's main antenna became stuck. Using the secondary antenna and software for intermittent recording, observations continued. "I tip my hat to SOHO's engineering and operations teams, whose skills and dedication let us overcome all these challenges," says Bernhard Fleck, ESA's Project Scientist for SOHO. More than 3200 scientists from around the world have been involved with SOHO, which is a project of international collaboration between ESA and NASA. SOHO's telescopes probe the Sun from deep in its interior and all the way out to Earth's orbit and beyond, where the magnetised solar wind of atomic particles sweeps through interplanetary space. "It's impossible to overstate the importance of SOHO to the worldwide solar science community," said Dr. Joe Gurman, U.S. project scientist for SOHO at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "In the last ten years, SOHO has revolutionized our ideas about the solar interior and atmosphere and the acceleration of the solar wind." Some of SOHO's major scientific accomplishments include:
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Scientists marvel at the achievements made by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope in this produced movie looking at the crown jewel observatory that has served as our window on the universe.
Mercury astronaut John Glenn becomes the first American to orbit the Earth on February 20, 1962, when he is launched aboard Friendship 7.
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Check out NASA's Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft undergoing thermal blanket installation inside the cleanroom at Kennedy Space Center's Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility in preparation for launch in January from the Cape.
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This week marks the anniversary of arguably the most daring and complex space shuttle mission. The astronauts successfully launched two satellites and then recovered two others during extraordinary spacewalks by astronauts using jet-propelled backpacks and pure muscle power.
Commander Bill McArthur and flight engineer Valery Tokarev conduct a 5 1/2-hour spacewalk outside the International Space Station, installing a TV camera, doing repair chores and jettisoning a failed science probe.
Return to flight space shuttle commander Eileen Collins narrates an interesting slide show featuring some favorite photographs of Earth taken during her previous shuttle missions.
NASA Administrator Mike Griffin goes before the U.S. House of Representative's Science Committee to provide an update on the moon-Mars exploration program, the future of the space shuttle and space station, possible servicing of Hubble, cost overruns on the James Webb Space Telescope and the agency's aeronautics research.
VIDEO:
ATLAS ROCKET LAUNCHES SOHO