They used the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to transmit a signal toward SOHO and one of the Deep Space Network dishes in Goldstone, California acted as a receiver, locating the spacecraft’s echo and tracking it using radar techniques. But the engineering and science teams worked painstakingly for three months, and finally used a technique called bistatic radar to find and re-establish contact with SOHO. Contact was lost, the mission was thought to be over. Two and a half years after launch, in June 1998, the mission almost ended following a routine spacecraft maneuver. Credit: SOHO/ESA/NASA.īut SOHO’s 25 years haven’t been with a few nail-biting incidents. “CMEs are entirely harmless to comets structurally, but the magnetic field embedded in them can mess around with dust in the comet tails.” SOHO LASCO image of a coronal mass ejection and comet C/2002 V1 (NEAT) back 2003. “This was a rare instance where the CME actually passed right over the comet and we saw a little interaction between the CME and the comet tail,” Battams said during the AMA. The second one shows a CME reaching out towards comet C/2002 V1 (NEAT) back in 2003. LASCO C2 coronagraph image from 1998, showing a stunning helical structure in a coronal mass ejection (CME). It shows a stunning helical structure in a coronal mass ejection (CME). The first is one from the LASCO C2 coronagraph, and was taken 1998, below. “There have been so many mind-blowing images that I absolutely cannot pick a single one,” he said. During a Reddit AMA this week to celebrate the anniversary, Battams was asked if has any favorite images. LASCO, the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph has recorded over 1.5 million images since the mission started. More than 1,500 scientists in countries from around the world are either directly involved in SOHO’s instruments or have used SOHO data in their research programs. The scientific payload of SOHO comprises 12 complementary instruments, ( see a list of the instruments here) developed and furnished by an international consortium of 29 institutes from 15 countries.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |