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Welcome
to the CDS website
Launched
in 1995, the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is the
world's largest solar physics space mission and it has revolutionised
our
understanding
of the Sun. The Coronal Diagnostic Spectrometer (CDS) is
a unique
instrument, designed to detect solar extreme ultraviolet radiation
which allows
us to probe conditions in
the solar corona. The spectra recorded by CDS provide
information on temperature, density, elemental composition and flows of
very
hot plasma trapped in the Sun's magnetic field. The CDS operation is
run from
RAL, where the requests for observations from a user community of 15 UK
institutes and over 60 world-wide groups are coordinated, planned and
run.
Latest
News:
Sun|trek
- an educational
resource for schools
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Sun|trek
is an exciting new website
for school students and teachers about the
Sun and its effect on the Earth. Sun|trek
has been motivated and inspired by the
fantastic images and movies of the Sun taken from
space (for example from the SOHO satellite). It is narrated
by solar
guides (young solar researchers), who not only share
the excitement that they feel about working with these solar space
projects, but also say a bit about themselves, how they
became interested in astronomy and what their other interests are. They
are 'role models' who could inspire the younger
students. |
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The detection of magneto-acoustic waves propagating from the
chromosphere to
the corona using CDS. Left panel: a composite CDS and TRACE
multi-wavelength
image of an active region. The coincidence of the sunspot umbra,
sunspot plume
(turquoise), and emerging coronal loop system (blue) is apparent. These
are
locations where magnetic-acoustic waves have been detected, propagating
from
the chromosphere to the corona. Right panel: atmospheric structure
above a sunspot
with increasing temperature, obtained from CDS and other SOHO
instruments. More
details can be found in Marsh
& Walsh (2006).
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Selected
results and movies from SOHO - courtesy of the SOHO and Instrument
teams.
Surface Magnetic polarities
QuickTime |
Problems viewing the movies:
Mozilla,Firefox & Windows Media Player should work fine together
IE & Windows Media Player may have issues:
Either click 'close' on the WMP 'download failed box' then click play
on WMP
(Once cached locally the movie should play)
or right click on an image and select 'Save Target as' then save file
to disc.
Play the saved file by double clicking on it.
or simply chose the QuickTime option |
Some
amazing facts about
CDS
- 10,000,000
exposures have been
taken
- 34,000
science studies have
been run
- 240,000
science fits files have
been produced
- 3,500
individual science
plans have been made
- 400,000
command blocks have
been sent to CDS by the CDS ground system
- 400GB
of data sent back from
CDS
- 666
reviewed science papers published
The mechanisms have performed:
- 24,000,000
mirror steps
- 7,000,000
slit steps
- 24,000,000
instrument pointing
movements
and all with just one major service, and that was before launch
News:
A CDS
Intrument status
page is now online.
The CDS User
Guide has been updated with
latest GIS information.
FINAL
FITS PRODUCTS
We
still await the definative orbit information files. Processing of CDS
final telemetry continues, though data sets are not being flagged as
'Final' until the orbit files becomes available. View the CD
Processing page to see the
current processing status
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