Space Station Threshold

A mission to the sun is difficult stuff. For 30 years scientists and engineers have struggled with developing a spacecraft that could survive the harsh environment close to the sun, but always ended up running into insurmountable technology limitations or blowing the top off the budget. But now the Applied Physics Lab believes [...]

Continuing on its epic journey around the Sun, Ulysses has reached the Sun's north pole just in the nick of time. In fact, its timing couldn't be better, just as the Sun begins "Solar Cycle 24". The probe is in a unique orbit, passing over the solar north and south poles, out of the ecliptic plane [...]

On December 2nd, 1995 a large joint ESA and NASA mission was launched to gain an insight to the dynamics of the Sun and its relationship with the space between the planets. 12 years on, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SoHO) continues to witness some of the largest explosions ever seen in the solar system, [...]

Blinking spots of intense light are being observed all over the lower atmosphere of the Sun. Not just in the active regions, but in polar regions, quiet regions, sunspots, coronal holes and loops. These small explosions fire elegant jets of hot solar matter into space, generating X-rays as they go. Although X-ray jets are known [...]

NASA’s newest solar observatories have released their first images of the Sun, and they’re great. Of course, to really enjoy the pictures, you’ll need 3-D glasses. The observatories are the twin Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) satellites, which were launched on October 25th, 2006. They both orbit the Sun at the ...