Hot news - Hinode

Hinode – SolarB

Solar-B was launched successfully on 22 September 2006 from the Uchinoura Space Centre in southern Japan. All Japanese space missions are renamed after they have been launched successfully and so this is now called ‘Hinode’, the Japanese for ‘sunrise’.

Scientists from the UK (led by Louise Harra) are involved in the mission, which will provide unprecedented detail of the Sun’s activity. The Hinode mission has been designed and built by teams in the UK, US and Japan. Hinode will be used to study the interaction between the Sun's magnetic field and its corona, which should aid our understanding of the causes of solar activity.

Hinode will also be used to study solar flares – huge explosions on the Sun. High energy particles, such as protons, shoot out from solar flares and can arrive at Earth within tens of minutes, to be followed a few days later by coronal mass ejections. These huge bubbles of gas threaded with magnetic field lines can cause major magnetic disturbances on Earth, sometimes with catastrophic results. Scientists will use Hinode to investigate the so-called trigger phase of these events.

Here is one of the very first images taken by the Hinode of the X-ray emission from the Sun.

For further information take a look at these weblinks:

http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/www_solar/solarB/

http://solar-b.nao.ac.jp/index_e.shtml