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.
Return to the SOHO home page.