SOHO Science Operations

SOHO will be commanded from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Maryland (USA). Its data will be retrieved via the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) and routed to the Experimenters' Operations Facility (EOF) located at GSFC. There the SOHO experimenters will be able to display on their workstations the images and measurements that are being produced by their instruments. From the EOF the experimenters will point the instruments aboard SOHO to a particular region of the Sun, or change the operating mode of the instruments. The SOHO scientists will use their instruments very much as an observer would at a ground-based observatory.

The EOF will be the forum where the experimenters will coordinate their observations within SOHO and/or with ground based solar observatories. Electronically accessible data catalogs and data banks will be established at the EOF and at several participating institutes, both in the USA and in Europe. A sample Mosaic forms interface for the SOHO data catalog is accessible here.

SOHO instruments will produce a data stream of 200 kilobits per second, that can be transmitted continuously to the DSN stations of Goldstone (USA), Canberra (Australia) and Madrid (Spain), when each is visible from SOHO due to the daily rotation of the Earth.

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