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PD0RDD > NASA 24.10.98 20:10l 108 Lines 5643 Bytes #-10029 (0) @ WW
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From: PD0RDD@PI8WNO.#UTR.NLD.EU
To : NASA@WW
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SOHO IS NEARLY BACK IN BUSINESS
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Brilliant new pictures of the Sun from the solar spacecraft SOHO show
that its ordeal is coming to a happy ending, nearly four months after
the ESA/NASA mission seemed lost in space on 24 June. Images from the
Michelson Doppler Imager and the Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope
on SOHO (the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) can be already seen on
the Internet.
Scientists on both sides of the Atlantic have waited anxiously for the
recovery of SOHO, commented Roger Bonnet, ESA's director of science.
Thanks to the extraordinary determination and skill of ESA and NASA
personnel, with industrial contractors and scientific teams also playing
their part, the world has recovered its chief watchdog on the Sun. SOHO
is needed more than ever, because the Sun is rapidly becoming stormier
with a mounting count of sunspots.
It's very exciting to see these images again after so many weeks of
concern. We hope that all the SOHO scientific instruments can be
returned to the same level of health, so we can resume normal scientific
operations in the near future,said Dr. Joseph Gurman, the U.S. project
scientist for SOHO, and co-investigator on EIT.
As of today, nine of the twelve instruments on board SOHO have been
turned on. Four of them are already fully functional, the other five
are still undergoing careful recommissioning activities. But so far no
signs of damage due to thermal stress during the deep freeze have been
detected. I tip my hat to the engineers who built this spacecraft and
these sensitive but robust instruments, aid Dr. Bernhard Fleck, the ESA
project scientist for SOHO. The remaining three instruments will be
switched on over the next few weeks.
The images are the latest success for the team during a complex,
challenging recovery sequence. On July 23, SOHO was located using radar
techniques with the 305-meter Arecibo, Puerto Rico, radio telescope of
the US National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC) as a transmitter
and a 70-meter dish of the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) as a receiver.
SOHO first responded to radio transmissions on August 3, and telemetry
from SOHO was received August 8, telling controllers the condition of
the spacecraft and its instruments. The spacecraft's frozen hydrazine
fuel was gradually thawed, and on September 16, SOHO's thrusters were
fired to stop its spin and to place it in the correct orientation
towards the Sun.
Prior to the interruption, instruments on SOHO had taken about two
million images of the Sun, which represents over a terabyte (a trillion
bytes) of data. After its launch on Dec. 2, 1995, SOHO revolutionized
solar science by its special ability to observe simultaneously the
interior and atmosphere of the Sun, and particles in the solar wind and
the Sun's outer atmosphere.
SOHO observations have been the subject of more than 200 papers
submitted to refereed, scientific journals. Apart from discoveries about
flows of gas inside the Sun, giant "tornadoes" of hot, electrically
charged gas, and clashing magnetic field-lines, SOHO also proved its
worth as the chief watchdog for the Sun, giving early warning of
eruptions that could affect the Earth.
SOHO operates at a special vantage point 1.5 million kilometers (about
one million miles) out in space, on the sunward side of the Earth. The
spacecraft was built in Europe and it carries both European and American
instruments, with international science teams. SOHO was launched on an
Atlas IIAS rocket and is operated from NASA's Goddard Space Flight
Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
In April 1998, SOHO's scientists celebrated two years of successful
operations and the decision of ESA and NASA to extend the mission to
2003. The extension would enable SOHO to observe intense solar
activity, expected when the count of sunspots rises to a maximum around
the year 2000. It would remain the flagship of a multinational fleet of
solar spacecraft, including the ESA/NASA Ulysses and Cluster II
missions.
The first EIT image taken in the Fe IX/X line at 171 A is available at:
http://sohowww.estec.esa.nl/operations/Recovery/eit_171_981013.gif and
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/operations/Recovery/eit_171_981013.gif
The MDI image can be found at: http://soi.stanford.edu
The latest SOHO EIT images can be found on the Web at:
http://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/eit/eit_full_res.html
Details about the operations and about SOHO in general, can be found at:
http://sohowww.estec.esa.nl and http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov
Information on the recovery of SOHO can be found at:
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/operations/Recovery/
.
Greetings from Hans at Maarssenbroek ³~ The Netherlands
HomebBs : PI8WNO × .
E-Mail : pd0rdd@hj-lammers.demon.nl ××׶ Úп
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