Latest Solar and Heliospheric Observatory Stories

GREENBELT, Md., March 15, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Local news media are invited to the Maryland Science Center at 601 Light Street, Baltimore, on Friday, March 22, to cover hands-on NASA Sun Earth Day activities from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. EDT. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) Educator specialists from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. will be on hand working with 3,000 local middle and high school students on various experiments....

NASA When the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) launched on Dec. 2, 1995, it provided some of the first high-resolution observations of the sun unobscured by Earth's own atmosphere. A joint ESA/NASA mission, SOHO has helped revolutionize our understanding of the sun's interior and complex atmosphere -- home to a variety of giant explosions, including eruptions of solar material known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Indeed, before SOHO there was disagreement over what a CME headed...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online At 10:23 pm EDT on September 27, 2012, NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) captured an image of a particularly wide coronal mass ejection (CME) that erupted from the Sun. SOHO is an international collaborative effort between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) to study the Sun from its deep core to the outer corona. The SOHO spacecraft also studies the solar winds generated by solar events. The sun erupted in a...

Watch the Video: Lightbulb Shaped CME Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The sun sent off another coronal mass ejection (CME) last week, but this time the plasma burst showed up in the form of a light bulb. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) caught the CME light bulb with its Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) C2 instrument. This instrument is able to take images of the solar corona by blocking the light coming directly from the Sun with...

A light bulb-shaped eruption leaps from the Sun and blasts into space in this archival image from the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, SOHO. SOHO captured the scene on 27 February 2000, watching as a large filament rose from the Sun’s broiling atmosphere and evolved into the coronal mass ejection loop seen here. A coronal mass ejection – or CME – is a huge cloud of magnetised plasma ejected from the Sun’s atmosphere – the corona – and launched into interplanetary...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online While the nation shoots off plenty of fireworks for the Fourth of July, NASA will be sending off its own rocket the next day. The space agency will be launching its Solar Ultraviolet Magnetograph Investigation (SUMI) on Thursday to study the magnetic fields on the sun. SUMI will set out to study the constantly changing magnetic fields in an area of the sun's low atmosphere called the chromosphere. These magnetic fields lie at the...

ESA has awarded the contract to build its next-generation Sun explorer to Astrium UK. Solar Orbiter will investigate how the Sun creates and controls the heliosphere, the extended atmosphere of the Sun. Prof. Alvaro Giménez Cañete, ESA Director of Science and Robotic Exploration and Miranda Mills, National Director – Earth Observation, Navigation and Science of Astrium signed the contract on 26 April on the occasion of a ceremony celebrating 50 years of the UK in space. The...

[ Watch the Solar Flare in Action Here and Here ] NASA said on Wednesday that two Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are now traveling faster than 1,300 miles per second, on track towards Earth. NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) and the Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) caught the CMEs as they took-off from the sun. The space agency said the first CME, which is traveling at about 1,300 miles per second, will reach Earth on the morning of March 8. This CME...

PALO ALTO, Calif., Jan. 19, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- In a paper to be published tomorrow in the journal Science, for the first time ever scientists at the Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory (LMSAL) at the Advanced Technology Center (ATC) in Palo Alto, and collaborators at other institutions, have reported observations and analysis of the final death throes of a comet, as it passed across the face of the Sun on July 6, 2011, to vanish in flight. Using...

[ Watch the Video ] On December 16, an armada of spacecraft witnessed something that many experts thought impossible.  Comet Lovejoy flew through the hot atmosphere of the sun and emerged intact. "It's absolutely astounding," says Karl Battams of the Naval Research Lab in Washington DC.  "I did not think the comet's icy core was big enough to survive plunging through the several million degree solar corona for close to an hour, but Comet Lovejoy is still with us." The comet's close...