The Yokhoh Mission
Mission Objectives
  • Study explosive energy releases from the sun.
  • Identify conditions that precede these energy releases so that we can predict them
How Will It Do This?
  • Yokhoh will view the sun in hard xrays, soft xrays and gamma rays. These radiations come from gases heated to extremely high temperatures in active regions on the sun and from rapid slowing down of fast-moving electrons.
  • The soft xray telescope imager was jointly built by US scientists at Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory and Japanese scientists from the NationalAstronomical Observatory of Japan and the University of Tokyo.
Mission Description
  • Yokhoh (Japanese for Sunbeam)
  • Launched Aug 30, 1991 at 2:30 UT into nearly circular Earth orbit (570 x 730 km) from theKagoshima Space Centre in southern Japan.
  • Three-axis stabilized observatory mission
  • 50 MBytes of data generated per day
The solar x-ray images are from the Yohkoh mission of ISAS, Japan. The x-ray telescope was prepared by the Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, and the University of Tokyo with the support of NASA and ISAS.
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