The International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) has presented the SOHO spacecraft team with the prestigious Laurels for Team Achievement Award. The award recognises both the outstanding achievements in designing and building the spacecraft, operating the mission, as well as the science it has performed.
SOHO is a project to study the sun from its deep core to its outer corona, including the solar wind. SOHO is a shortening of Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, and was built by Astrium EADS in Toulouse on behalf of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in cooperation.
The SOHO spacecraft, which was launched on December 2nd 1995, was specified for a two years lifetime in operation, but thanks to an almost perfect orbit injection by the ATLAS 2AS launcher (requiring only small amount of fuel for delta-orbit correction), good spacecraft design and operation by the SOHO team, SOHO is still going strong eight years later. In December there will be a eight anniversary celebration since the SOHO satellite was launched.
"We can be proud of having been involved from 1990 to 1996 in the design, construction, testing, launch and finally in-flight testing of SOHO - before it was officially taken over by ESA/NASA in the early summer of 1996," says Nils Harald Hansen at the DNV-office in Toulouse.
Though the SOHO spacecraft was designed for a two-year-mission, its spectacular success has led to two extensions of the mission, firstly until 2003 and then until March 2007. The award is a tribute to a team that has contributed to one of the most successful space missions in history.
All the SOHO science data is available for everybody that has Internet access, and every day you can collect the latest pictures taken by SOHO through the different instruments (Coronal spectrometer, Energetic particle analyser, Ultraviolet imaging, Spectrometric coronagraph and others).
For more data, pictures and information, please consult the SOHO home page: http://sohowww.estec.esa.nl/