The Yokhoh Mission
| Mission Objectives |
- Study explosive energy releases from the sun.
- Identify conditions that precede these energy releases
so that we can predict them
|
How Will It Do This? |
- Yokhoh will view the sun in hard xrays, soft xrays and
gamma rays. These radiations come from gases heated
to extremely high temperatures in active regions on the
sun and from rapid slowing down of fast-moving
electrons.
- The soft xray telescope imager was jointly built by
US scientists at Lockheed Palo Alto Research
Laboratory and Japanese scientists from the
NationalAstronomical Observatory of Japan
and the University of Tokyo.
|
Mission Description |
- Yokhoh (Japanese for Sunbeam)
- Launched Aug 30, 1991 at 2:30 UT into nearly circular
Earth orbit (570 x 730 km) from theKagoshima Space
Centre in southern Japan.
- Three-axis stabilized observatory mission
- 50 MBytes of data generated per day
|
The solar x-ray images are from the Yohkoh mission of ISAS, Japan. The x-ray telescope was prepared by the Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, and the University of Tokyo with the support of NASA and ISAS.