In December 1998, NASA announced selection of three US teams to develop instruments and science programs for the forthcoming joint Japanese-US-UK solar satellite project presently called Solar-B. Three NSO scientists are members of one of the selected teams: J. Harvey, C. Keller, and T. Rimmele. The satellite, to be launched in February 2004, is a project of Japan's Institute of Space and Aeronautical Sciences (ISAS) following their very successful Yohkoh mission. Major participation from the US and UK is part of both missions. The primary scientific goal of Solar-B is to explore the coupling of energy transfer throughout the solar atmosphere. This mission will, for the first time, realize a decades-long dream of solar astronomers to take advantage of space to provide high angular resolution images of the sun with sustained quality approaching the best resolution snapshots that have been obtained on the ground. The instrument, which includes NSO participation, will be built by Lockheed-Martin's Advanced Technology Center with Alan Title as US Principal Investigator. The instrument is a Focal Plane Instrument Package located at the focal plane of a 50-cm aperture telescope. Other US members of the Lockheed team are the High Altitude Observatory (which has major responsibility for the spectrograph part of the instrument), the Center for Astrophysics, Goddard Space Flight Center, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago.
Jack Harvey