Solar Science

It’s difficult sometimes to carry on a blog when the primary focus of your discussion doesn’t do anything. That’s the nature of solar minima, I guess, but particularly true when you have an apparent regime change in the solar cycle.

The latest news is that SOHO is back online after a glitch forced the software onboard to be reloaded with new commands, and mission controllers took an opportunity to bake all of the CCDs onboard the spacecraft to remove dead pixels.

Today the Sun is blank.

This image from the EIT (Extreme ultra-violet Imaging Telescope) at 195 Angstroms show no spots and no significant coronal holes.

The SOHO instruments are offline while new software commands are uploaded. As the main instruments are offline, the other CCD systems are being baked out (heated up to clear dead pixels)

From Spaceweather.com

Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is having a minor problem. SOHO’s white light solar telescope is temporarily offline while new commands and data tables are uploaded to the spacecraft. Normal operations are expected to resume in a few days.

Hence no updates on the state of the Sun.

The Sun could have a sudden burst of activity and we’d never know.