NASA plans trio of sun-watching missions

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Supporting roles
If it survives long enough, SOHO will also be used for the crucial task of calibrating SDO to make more accurate readings of the data it collects.

Meanwhile, Fleck told SPACE.com, he and other SOHO engineers are working to automate SOHO mission procedures and observations to "fly very cheaply." Instead of scientists monitoring the status of instruments, "this will be done by computers which will alert the spacecraft engineers and instrument teams in case of an anomaly," Fleck said. "The plan is to move to unmanned night passes in the fall."
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Seeing a 3-D sun
April 23: STEREO project scientist Michael Kaiser explains how the twin STEREO spacecraft produce 3-D images.
NASA

If SOHO can hang in there, it will also make up for a shortcoming of the STEREO mission plan. STEREO's two spacecraft are drifting apart at about 45 degrees each year. Within four years, the probes will be so widely spaced they won't be watching the portion of the Sun that faces us, and they won't be able to properly monitor how solar storms will affect Earth.

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SOHO can fill in the gap.

"SOHO is actually the third eye of STEREO," Fleck said, and even now many of STEREO's observations are enhanced by adding SOHO data. In order to whip up a 3-D image, astronomers need three points of reference, so STEREO's twins provide two points while SOHO generates the third.

Currently, SOHO and its instruments appear in good shape, and Stenborg said battery power (a typical reason for instrument conk-outs on an old mission) is not an issue.

Stenborg said most of the instruments will be decommissioned a year or two after SDO is launched, which is set for August 2008. "They will be taken out of operation except for LASCO and a couple of other instruments, especially because SDO has no LASCO kind of instrument," he said.

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