Hinode (ひので, Japanese: "Sunrise"), formerly known as Solar-B, is a Japan Aerospace Exploration AgencySolar mission with United States and United Kingdom collaboration. It is the follow-up to the Yohkoh ("Solar-A") mission and it was launched on the final flight of the M-V rocket from Uchinoura Space Center, Japan on September 22, 2006 at 21:36 GMT (September 23, 06:36 JST). Initial orbit was perigee height 280 km, apogee height 686 km, inclination 98.3 degrees. Then the satellite maneuvered to the quasi-circular sun-synchronous orbit over the day/night terminator, which allows near-continuous observation of the Sun. On October 28, the probe's instruments captured their first images.
Mission
Hinode is planned as a three-year mission is to explore the magnetic fields of the Sun. It consists of a coordinated set of optical, extreme ultraviolet (EUV), and x-ray instruments to investigate the interaction between the Sun's magnetic field and its corona. The result will be an improved understanding of the mechanisms that power the solar atmosphere and drive solar eruptions. NASA, the space agency of the United States, developed three science instrument components: the Focal Plane Package (FPP), the X-Ray Telescope (XRT), and the Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer (EIS) and shares operations support for science planning and instrument command generation.[1]
Instruments
Hinode carries three main instruments to study the Sun:
A Wolter telescope design that uses grazing incidence optics to image the solar corona's hottest components (0.5 to 10 Million K) with an angular resolution of approximately 1 arcsec.
A normal incidence extreme ultraviolet (EUV) spectrometer that obtains spatially resolved spectra in two wavelength bands: 17.0-21.2 and 24.6-29.2 nm. Spatial resolution is around 2 arcsec, and the field of view is up to 560 x 512 arcsec^2. The emission lines in the EIS wavelength bands are emitted at temperatures ranging from 50,000 K to 20 million K. EIS is used to identify the physical processes involved in heating the solar corona.
