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January 20, 2001 International team Building Next Explorer to Study the Sun: Solar-B is an international mission sponsored by ISAS based in
Sagamihara, a suburb of Tokyo, Japan, with its partners—NASA and the
Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council based in Swindon, United Kingdom. The heart of the Solar-B mission is a large solar optical telescope that is being developed by the Japanese Institute. To measure the magnetic fields, structures and flow patterns in the photosphere, NASA will provide a set of instruments for the telescope's focal plane. X-Ray and Extreme Ultraviolet Telescopes, each of which contain major components supplied by the three international partners, will record how the energy stored in and released by the magnetic field propagates through the Sun's outer atmosphere.
The Marshall Center is managing the development of the NASA-provided components for the Solar-B Focal Plane Package, the X-ray Telescope and the Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer.
When Solar-B instrument fabrication and testing is completed by the investigators and accepted by NASA, the instruments will be shipped to Japan for further testing and integration with the rest of the Solar-B satellite. Solar-B is scheduled for launch from Kagoshima, Japan, in August or early September 2005. Once the satellite is in orbit, NASA and the science teams will support instrument operations and data collection from the operations center located at ISAS in Sagamihara. (See Spaceflight Now! http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0101/20solarb/)
January 17, 2001 : NASA, international team building instruments to study Sun on Japan's Solar-B mission. Scientists from Japan, the United States and the United Kingdom are working together to build instruments to fly in 2005 on the Solar-B mission, a satellite being developed by Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS).
The Solar-B spacecraft will be placed into a Sun-synchronous orbit around the Earth. This is a polar rather than an equatorial orbit and allows the instruments to remain in continuous sunlight for nine months of each year. The Solar-B instruments will observe how magnetic fields on the Sun's surface, called the photosphere, interact with the Sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, that extends millions of miles out into space.
"This high-temperature outer solar atmosphere is the only place in the universe where scientists can make very detailed observations of how magnetic fields interact with the hot ionized gases, or plasmas, that make up all stars," said Dr. John Davis, Solar-B project scientist at the Marshall Center. "The instruments will work together to show how changes in magnetic fields deep inside the Sun erupt through the different layers of the Sun's atmosphere, creating the violent disturbances that sometimes affect us on Earth."
Solar-B's scientific mission is to observe the distribution of the magnetic field at the photosphere where it first becomes visible and to study how it releases its energy to the surrounding atmosphere. "By studying, in detail, how the character of the field changes with time over a solar cycle, we hope to learn how the field is generated and if and how the field affects solar luminosity," said Davis.
Solar scientists have found suggestions that extremely small magnetic features in the solar photosphere are responsible for the changes in the luminosity. Solar-B will enable the first comprehensive set of observations to determine the role of these features in long-term solar luminosity changes and provide better answers to this provocative question of how the Sun impacts Earth's climate.
December 1998: NASA announced the selection of three US teams to develop instruments and science programs for the forthcoming joint Japanese-US-UK solar satellite project presently called Solar-B. The satellite, to be launched in February 2004, is a project of Japan's Institute of Space and Aeronautical Sciences (ISAS) following their very successful Yohkoh mission. Major participation from the US and UK is part of both missions. The primary scientific goal of Solar-B is to explore the coupling of energy transfer throughout the solar atmosphere. This mission will, for the first time, realize a decades-long dream of solar astronomers to take advantage of space to provide high angular resolution images of the sun with sustained quality approaching the best resolution snapshots that have been obtained on the ground. The instrument, which includes NSO participation, will be built by Lockheed-Martin's Advanced Technology Center with Alan Title as US Principal Investigator. The
instrument is a Focal Plane Instrument Package located at the focal plane of a 50-cm aperture telescope. Other US members of the Lockheed team are the High Altitude Observatory (which has major responsibility for the spectrograph part of the instrument), the Center for Astrophysics, Goddard Space Flight Center, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago. (NOAO Newsletter - National Solar Observatory - March 1999 - Number 57)
August 30, 1991 : The Solar-A mission was launched from the Kagoshima Space Center, Japan. The Solar-A spacecraft became Yohkoh effective upon launch. The Yohkoh Mission is a Japanese Solar mission with US and UK collaborators. 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). MSFC Solar Physics Group members* Ron Moore, David Falconer, and Alphonse Sterling are involved in analyzing these images to determine the nature of the magnetic connections in the solar atmosphere and characteristics of flare-like activity.
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