Remarkably, the concept of using a spacecraft to monitor the entire Sun continuously was not an easy sell, notes Joseph Gurman, Project Scientist for SOHO at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Moreover, this sentinel's longevity has yielded observations over an entire 11-year cycle of solar activity, providing unprecedented insights about how our star works. But thanks to the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, launched in December 1995, researchers can view the Sun's atmosphere any time they want, day or night, from the comfort of their computers.ĭeveloped jointly by NASA and the European Space Agency, SOHO and its 12 experiments monitor the Sun's brilliant disk and its corona in ways impossible from ground-based telescopes. These fleeting glimpses of the corona last just a few minutes and happen only every 19 months on average. They watched in awe as the Moon completely covered the Sun and revealed wispy, incandescent streamers in our star's million-degree atmosphere, the corona. On July 11th, amateur astronomers from around the world trekked to remote islands in the South Pacific to witness a total solar eclipse. ESA engineers examine to the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory during assembly at the Matra Marconi Space facility.
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