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The Yohkoh Mission is a Japanese Solar mission with US and UK
collaborators that was launched into Earth orbit in August of 1991. Until 2001, Yohkoh provided
valuable data about the Sun's
corona and
solar flares.
The satellite carries four instruments - a Soft X-ray Telescope (SXT), a Hard
X-ray Telescope (HXT), a Bragg Crystal Spectrometer (BCS), and a Wide Band Spectrometer
(WBS)
Yohkoh suffered a spacecraft failure in December 2001 that
put an end to this mission. During the solar eclipse of December 14th the
spacecraft lost pointing, thus spacecraft
operators were unable to command the satellite to point toward the sun and the batteries discharged.
MSFC Solar Physics Group members* Ron Moore,
David Falconer, and
Alphonse Sterling continue to be involved in analyzing
archived data from Yohkoh to determine the nature of the magnetic connections in the solar
atmosphere and characteristics of flare-like activity.
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