NASA's SOHO Celebrates 20 Years of Space-based Science

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

After 20 years in space, ESA and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, is still going strong. Originally launched in 1995 to study the sun and its influence out to the very edges of the solar system, SOHO revolutionized this field of science, known as heliophysics, providing the basis for nearly 5,000 scientific papers. SOHO also found an unexpected role as the greatest comet hunter of all time—reaching 3,000 comet discoveries in September 2015.

When SOHO was launched on Dec. 2, 1995, the field of heliophysics looked very different than it does today. Questions about the interior of the sun, the origin of the constant outflow of material from the sun known as the solar wind, and the mysterious heating of the solar atmosphere were still unanswered. Twenty years later, not only do we have a much better idea about what powers the sun, but our entire understanding of how the sun behaves has changed.

“SOHO changed the popular view of the sun from a picture of a static, unchanging object in the sky to the dynamic beast it is,” said Bernhard Fleck, ESA SOHO project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Even the concept of space weather—now defined to encompass any events or conditions stemming from the sun that can affect space-borne and ground-based technological systems and through these, human life and endeavors—wasn’t well-understood when SOHO launched. At the time, it was thought that solar flares were the primary Earth-effective solar event, in part because they were the most commonly-observed. Thanks to SOHO’s coronagraph—a type of camera that uses a solid disk to block out the bright face of the sun to better observe the comparatively faint solar atmosphere, known as the corona—today we know that giant clouds that burst off the sun called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, are a major piece of the space weather puzzle. Though two space-based coronagraphs preceded the one on SOHO, neither provided the same quantity or quality of observations.  

“Many faint CMEs had escaped notice on older coronagraphs,” said Joe Gurman, US project scientist for SOHO at Goddard. “In light of the SOHO data, we realized CMEs are much more common—and more variable throughout the solar cycle—than we thought.”

CMEs, which are huge, fast-moving clouds of electrically-charged solar material that contain embedded magnetic fields, can cause geomagnetic storms when they collide with Earth’s magnetic field, causing it to shimmy and shake. The ability to connect the effects of geomagnetic storms—like auroras, GPS and communication disturbances, and geomagnetically induced currents, which can put a strain on power grids—to events on the sun has brought the idea of space weather into the mainstream.

“Thanks to SOHO, there’s a growing public recognition that we live in the extended atmosphere of a magnetically active star,” said Gurman. “And people realize that solar activity can affect Earth.”

But SOHO’s coronagraph wasn’t the only game-changing instrument. Before SOHO launched, carrying the Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope, or EIT, the only cameras taking images of the sun in extreme ultraviolet light—which Earth’s atmosphere blocks, making it impossible to observe from the ground—were on suborbital sounding rockets, which collect data for only minutes at a time.

These tsunamis on the solar surface—still known by many as EIT waves, after the instrument that first observed them—happen in close conjunction with CMEs. Before the discovery of solar tsunamis, scientists often had no way of knowing if a CME was heading directly toward or directly away from Earth, since all CMEs on the Earth-sun line simply appear in coronagraph images as a giant halo around the sun.

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