Hinode (; , , Sunrise), formerly Solar-B, is a

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency The is the Japanese national Aeronautics, air and space agency. Through the merger of three previously independent organizations, JAXA was formed on 1 October 2003. JAXA is responsible for research, technology development and launch of satell ...

Solar mission with

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

and

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

collaboration. It is the follow-up to the Yohkoh (Solar-A) mission and it was launched on the final flight of the M-V rocket from Uchinoura Space Center,

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

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 A Sun-synchronous orbit (SSO), also called a heliosynchronous orbit, is a nearly polar orbit around a planet, in which the satellite passes over any given point of the planet's surface at the same local mean solar time. More technically, it is ...

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. The data from Hinode are being downloaded to the Norwegian, terrestrial Svalsat station, operated by ''

Kongsberg Kongsberg () is a historical mining town and municipality in Buskerud county, Norway. The city is located on the river Numedalslågen at the entrance to the valley of Numedal. Kongsberg has been a centre of silver mining, arms production and fo ...

'' a few kilometres west of

Longyearbyen Longyearbyen (, , "Longyear Town") is the world's northernmost settlements, northernmost settlement with a population greater than 1,000, and the capital and the largest inhabited area of Svalbard. It stretches along the foot of the left bank ( ...

Svalbard Svalbard ( , ), previously known as Spitsbergen or Spitzbergen, is a Norway, Norwegian archipelago that lies at the convergence of the Arctic Ocean with the Atlantic Ocean. North of continental Europe, mainland Europe, it lies about midway be ...

. From there, data is transmitted by Telenor through a fibre-optic network to mainland Norway at

Harstad Harstad may refer to: Places *Harstad (town) Harstad (; ) is a List of towns and cities in Norway, city in Harstad Municipality in Troms county, Norway. The city is also the administrative centre of Harstad Municipality. The city has a populati ...

, and on to data users in North America, Europe and Japan.

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 ultraviolet (EUV), and

x-ray An X-ray (also known in many languages as Röntgen radiation) is a form of high-energy electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength shorter than those of ultraviolet rays and longer than those of gamma rays. Roughly, X-rays have a wavelength ran ...

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. The EUV imaging spectrometer (EIS) was built by a consortium led by the Mullard Space Science Laboratory ( MSSL) in the UK.

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States, US federal government responsible for the United States ...

, the space agency of the United States, was involved with 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. , the operation is planned to continue until 2033.

Instruments

Hinode carries three main instruments to study the

Sun The Sun is the star at the centre of the Solar System. It is a massive, nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core, radiating the energy from its surface mainly as visible light a ...

SOT (Solar Optical Telescope)

A 0.5 meter Gregorian

optical telescope An optical telescope gathers and focus (optics), focuses light mainly from the visible spectrum, visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum, to create a magnification, magnified image for direct visual inspection, to make a photograph, or to co ...

with an

angular resolution Angular resolution describes the ability of any image-forming device such as an Optical telescope, optical or radio telescope, a microscope, a camera, or an Human eye, eye, to distinguish small details of an object, thereby making it a major det ...

of about 0.2

arcsecond A minute of arc, arcminute (abbreviated as arcmin), arc minute, or minute arc, denoted by the symbol , is a unit of angular measurement equal to of a degree. Since one degree is of a turn, or complete rotation, one arcminute is of a tu ...

over the

field of view The field of view (FOV) is the angle, angular extent of the observable world that is visual perception, seen at any given moment. In the case of optical instruments or sensors, it is a solid angle through which a detector is sensitive to elec ...

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, California Palo Alto ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. Th ...

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 magnetograph 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

. 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

SOHO SoHo, short for "South of Houston Street, Houston Street", is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City. Since the 1970s, the neighborhood has been the location of many artists' lofts and art galleries, art installations such as The Wall ...

XRT (X-ray Telescope)

A modified Wolter I telescope design that uses grazing incidence optics to image the

solar corona In astronomy, a corona (: coronas or coronae) is the outermost layer of a star's Stellar atmosphere, atmosphere. It is a hot but relatively luminosity, dim region of Plasma (physics), plasma populated by intermittent coronal structures such as so ...

'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 Observatory The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) is a research institute of the Smithsonian Institution, concentrating on Astrophysics, astrophysical studies including Galactic astronomy, galactic and extragalactic astronomy, cosmology, Sun, solar ...

(SAO), which, with the Harvard College Observatory (HCO) form the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). The camera was developed by NAOJ and

JAXA The is the Japanese national air and space agency. Through the merger of three previously independent organizations, JAXA was formed on 1 October 2003. JAXA is responsible for research, technology development and launch of satellites into o ...

EIS (Extreme-Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer)

A normal incidence extreme ultraviolet (EUV)

spectrometer A spectrometer () is a scientific instrument used to separate and measure Spectrum, spectral components of a physical phenomenon. Spectrometer is a broad term often used to describe instruments that measure a continuous variable of a phenomeno ...

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

References

External links

NASA Mission Site for HinodeJAXA overview of mission
*Mission overvie

preparation for launc

launc

(in Japanese)
Solar-B Mission Profile
b
NASA's Solar System ExplorationSolar-B project page
of National Astronomical Observatory of Japan
Solar-B project page
of Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory
Solar-B project page
of

Mullard Space Science Laboratory The UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL) is the United Kingdom's largest university space research group. MSSL is part of the Department of Space and Climate Physics at University College London (UCL), one of the first universities in th ...

Solar-B project page
of PPARC
Solar-B project page
of

MSFC
HINODE (SOLAR-B) SOT-FPP Education/Public Outreach
at Chabot Space and Science Center * {{Space observatories Satellites orbiting Earth Missions to the Sun Space telescopes X-ray telescopes Satellites of Japan Solar telescopes Spacecraft launched in 2006