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Solar Physics, 1999 Volume 187 Issue no. 2

The key problems concerning the physics of the solar atmosphere are still unsolved:

• How is the Corona heated to more than a million degrees?
• Where and how does the solar wind obtain its acceleration?
• Which processes in the lower corona lead to the gigantic mass ejections observed?

To gain some insight into these problems is the goal of the united ESA - NASA mission of the SOHO spacecraft.
 

The spacecraft is equiped with a number of new instruments for solar observation, one of which is LASCO. This instrument monitors the solar corona above the Sun's limb in a similar way as we perceive the corona during a solar eclipse. It produces images of the corona in the visible spectrum and with distance off the Sun's center ranging from 1.1 to 32 solar radii.

The telescopes C2 (covering the distance range of 1.5 to 6 solar radii) and C3 (3 to 32 solar radii) were constructed by the Laboratoire d'Astronomie Spatiale, Marseille, France and Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, USA, respectively. The instrument container was built by the Department of Physics and Space Research, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, England. This multinational cooperation was supervised and headed by the instrument's principal investigator Dr. Guenther Brueckner from NRL.

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