Hinode
Encyclopedia
Hinode formerly Solar-B, is a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency
Solar
mission with United States
and United Kingdom
collaboration. It is the follow-up to the Yohkoh
(Solar-A) mission and it was launched on the final flight of the M-V-7 rocket from Uchinoura Space Center
, Japan
on 22 September 2006 at 21:36 UTC
(23 September, 06:36 JST
). Initial orbit was perigee height 280 km, apogee height 686 km, inclination 98.3 degrees. Then the satellite maneuvered to the quasi-circular sun-synchronous orbit
over the day/night terminator
, which allows near-continuous observation of the Sun. On 28 October 2006, the probe's instruments captured their first images.
(EUV), and x-ray
instruments to investigate the interaction between the Sun's magnetic field and its corona. The result will be an improved understanding of the mechanisms that power the solar atmosphere and drive solar eruptions. NASA
, the space agency of the United States, developed three science instrument components: the Focal Plane Package (FPP), the X-Ray Telescope (XRT), and the Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer (EIS) and shares operations support for science planning and instrument command generation.
:
SOT (Solar Optical Telescope)
XRT (X-ray Telescope)
EIS (Extreme-Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer)
, through the Norwegian Space Centre
, as part of the contribution of the European Space Agency
to the Hinode mission. The other part of the contribution is to increase the amount of down linked data by about a factor of four, using ground stations located at Svalbard
. The data volumes in the Hinode archive are significant: 2 million compressed fits files with 1.5 terabytes of data after just half a year, and about 20 million images and thumbnails to go with them.
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency
The , or JAXA, is Japan's national aerospace agency. Through the merger of three previously independent organizations, JAXA was formed on October 1, 2003, as an Independent Administrative Institution administered by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and the...
Solar
Sun
The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is almost perfectly spherical and consists of hot plasma interwoven with magnetic fields...
mission with United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
collaboration. It is the follow-up to the Yohkoh
Yohkoh
Yohkoh , known before launch as Solar-A, was a Solar observatory spacecraft of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science with United States and United Kingdom collaboration...
(Solar-A) mission and it was launched on the final flight of the M-V-7 rocket from Uchinoura Space Center
Uchinoura Space Center
The is a space launch facility close to the Japanese town of Kimotsuki, in Kagoshima Prefecture. Before the establishment of the JAXA space agency in 2003, it was simply called the . All Japan's scientific satellites were launched from Uchinoura prior to the M-V launch vehicles being decommissioned...
, Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
on 22 September 2006 at 21:36 UTC
Coordinated Universal Time
Coordinated Universal Time is the primary time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time. It is one of several closely related successors to Greenwich Mean Time. Computer servers, online services and other entities that rely on having a universally accepted time use UTC for that purpose...
(23 September, 06:36 JST
Japan Standard Time
Japan Standard Time or JST is the standard timezone of Japan, and is 9 hours ahead of UTC. For example, when it is midnight in UTC, it is 09:00 in Japan Standard Time. There is no daylight saving time, though its introduction has been debated several times. Japan Standard Time is the same as...
). Initial orbit was perigee height 280 km, apogee height 686 km, inclination 98.3 degrees. Then the satellite maneuvered to the quasi-circular sun-synchronous orbit
Sun-synchronous orbit
A Sun-synchronous orbit is a geocentric orbit which combines altitude and inclination in such a way that an object on that orbit ascends or descends over any given point of the Earth's surface at the same local mean solar time. The surface illumination angle will be nearly the same every time...
over the day/night terminator
Terminator (solar)
A terminator, twilight zone or "grey line" is a moving line that separates the illuminated day side and the dark night side of a planetary body...
, which allows near-continuous observation of the Sun. On 28 October 2006, the probe's instruments captured their first images.
Mission
Hinode was planned as a three-year mission to explore the magnetic fields of the Sun. It consists of a coordinated set of optical, extreme ultravioletExtreme ultraviolet
Extreme Ultraviolet radiation is high-energy ultraviolet radiation, generally defined to be electromagnetic radiation in the part of the electromagnetic spectrum spanning wavelengths from 120 nm down to 10 nm, and therefore having photons with energies from 10 eV up to 124 eV...
(EUV), and x-ray
X-ray
X-radiation is a form of electromagnetic radiation. X-rays have a wavelength in the range of 0.01 to 10 nanometers, corresponding to frequencies in the range 30 petahertz to 30 exahertz and energies in the range 120 eV to 120 keV. They are shorter in wavelength than UV rays and longer than gamma...
instruments to investigate the interaction between the Sun's magnetic field and its corona. The result will be an improved understanding of the mechanisms that power the solar atmosphere and drive solar eruptions. NASA
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
, the space agency of the United States, developed three science instrument components: the Focal Plane Package (FPP), the X-Ray Telescope (XRT), and the Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer (EIS) and shares operations support for science planning and instrument command generation.
Instruments
Hinode carries three main instruments to study the SunSun
The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is almost perfectly spherical and consists of hot plasma interwoven with magnetic fields...
:
SOT (Solar Optical Telescope)
- A 0.5 meter Gregorian optical telescopeOptical telescopeAn optical telescope is a telescope which is used to gather and focus light mainly from the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum for directly viewing a magnified image for making a photograph, or collecting data through electronic image sensors....
with an angular resolutionAngular resolutionAngular resolution, or spatial resolution, describes the ability of any image-forming device such as an optical or radio telescope, a microscope, a camera, or an eye, to distinguish small details of an object...
of about 0.2 arcsecond over the field of viewField of viewThe field of view is the extent of the observable world that is seen at any given moment....
of about 400 x 400 arcsec. At the SOT focal plane, the Focal Plane Package (FPP) built by the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, CaliforniaPalo Alto, CaliforniaPalo Alto is a California charter city located in the northwest corner of Santa Clara County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, United States. The city shares its borders with East Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Stanford, Portola Valley, and Menlo Park. It is...
consists of three optical instruments: the Broadband Filter Imager (BFI) which produces images of the solar photosphere and chromosphere in six wide-band interference filters; the Narrowband Filter Imager (NFI) which is a tunable Lyot-type birefringent filter capable of producing magnetogram and dopplergram images of the solar surface; and the Spectropolarimeter (SP) which produces the most sensitive vector magnetographVector magnetographA vector magnetograph is a type of imaging telescope that can estimate the 3-D vector of the magnetic field on a distant body with a resolved line spectrum...
maps of the photosphere to date. The FPP also includes a Correlation Tracker (CT) which locks onto solar granulation to stabilize the SOT images to a fraction of an arcsecond. The spatial resolution of the SOT is a factor of 5 improvement over previous space-based solar telescopes (e.g., the MDI instrument on the SOHOSolar and Heliospheric ObservatoryThe Solar and Heliospheric Observatory is a spacecraft built by a European industrial consortium led by Matra Marconi Space that was launched on a Lockheed Martin Atlas IIAS launch vehicle on December 2, 1995 to study the Sun, and has discovered over 2100 comets. It began normal operations in May...
).
XRT (X-ray Telescope)
- A modified Wolter I telescope design that uses grazing incidence optics to image the solar corona's hottest components (0.5 to 10 Million K) with an angular resolution consistent with 1 arcsec pixels at the CCD. The telescope has an imaging field of view of 34 arcminutes. It is capable of capturing an image of the full sun when pointed at the center of the solar disk. The telescope was designed and built by Smithsonian Astrophysical ObservatorySmithsonian Astrophysical ObservatoryThe Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory is a research institute of the Smithsonian Institution headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where it is joined with the Harvard College Observatory to form the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics .-History:The SAO was founded in 1890 by...
(SAO), which, with the Harvard College Observatory (HCO) form the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). The camera was developed by NAOJ and JAXA.
EIS (Extreme-Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer)
- A normal incidence extreme ultraviolet (EUV) spectrometerSpectrometerA spectrometer is an instrument used to measure properties of light over a specific portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, typically used in spectroscopic analysis to identify materials. The variable measured is most often the light's intensity but could also, for instance, be the polarization...
that obtains spatially resolved spectra in two wavelength bands: 17.0-21.2 and 24.6-29.2 nm. Spatial resolution is around 2 arcsec, and the field of view is up to 560 x 512 arcsec2. The emission lines in the EIS wavelength bands are emitted at temperatures ranging from 50,000 K to 20 million K. EIS is used to identify the physical processes involved in heating the solar corona.
Hinode Science Data Centre Europe
The Hinode Science Data Centre (SDC) Europe has been developed at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics, University of OsloUniversity of Oslo
The University of Oslo , formerly The Royal Frederick University , is the oldest and largest university in Norway, situated in the Norwegian capital of Oslo. The university was founded in 1811 and was modelled after the recently established University of Berlin...
, through the Norwegian Space Centre
Norwegian Space Centre
The Norwegian Space Centre is a Norwegian government agency that promotes space exploration.-Norsk Romsenter :...
, as part of the contribution of the European Space Agency
European Space Agency
The European Space Agency , established in 1975, is an intergovernmental organisation dedicated to the exploration of space, currently with 18 member states...
to the Hinode mission. The other part of the contribution is to increase the amount of down linked data by about a factor of four, using ground stations located at Svalbard
Svalbard
Svalbard is an archipelago in the Arctic, constituting the northernmost part of Norway. It is located north of mainland Europe, midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. The group of islands range from 74° to 81° north latitude , and from 10° to 35° east longitude. Spitsbergen is the...
. The data volumes in the Hinode archive are significant: 2 million compressed fits files with 1.5 terabytes of data after just half a year, and about 20 million images and thumbnails to go with them.
External links
- NASA Mission Site for Hinode
- JAXA overview of mission
- Mission overview Quicktime, preparation for launch Quicktime Windows Media, launch Quicktime Windows Media (in Japanese)
- Solar-B Mission Profile by NASA's Solar System Exploration
- Solar-B project page of National Astronomical Observatory of JapanNational Astronomical Observatory of JapanThe is an astronomical research organisation comprising several facilities in Japan, as well as an observatory in Hawaii. It was established in 1988 as an amalgamation of three existing research organizations - the Tokyo Astronomical Observatory of the University of Tokyo, International Latitude...
- Solar-B project page of Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory
- Solar-B project page of Mullard Space Science LaboratoryMullard Space Science LaboratoryThe UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory is the United Kingdom's largest university space research group. MSSL is the Department of Space and Climate Physics of the University College London. UCL was one of the first universities in the world to conduct space research...
- Solar-B project page of PPARCParticle Physics and Astronomy Research CouncilThe Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council was one of a number of Research Councils in the United Kingdom. It directed, coordinated and funded research in particle physics and astronomy for the people of the UK...
- Solar-B project page of NASANASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
MSFCMarshall Space Flight CenterThe George C. Marshall Space Flight Center is the U.S. government's civilian rocketry and spacecraft propulsion research center. The largest center of NASA, MSFC's first mission was developing the Saturn launch vehicles for the Apollo moon program... - HINODE (SOLAR-B) SOT-FPP Education/Public Outreach at Chabot Space and Science CenterChabot Space and Science CenterChabot Space and Science Center, located in Oakland, California, is a hands-on center featuring interactive exhibits, a digital planetarium, a large screen theater, hands-on activities and three powerful telescopes....