SOHO Solar and Heliospheric Observatory Captures Stunning Coronal Mass Ejection

On Feb. 24, 2015, NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a joint mission with the European Space Agency, captured an extreme ultraviolet image of the Sun during a dramatic three-hour event. In that time, the Sun unleashed a coronal mass ejection (CME) along with part of a solar filament. While some strands of solar material fell back, a large portion surged into space as a brilliant cloud of charged particles.

Launched in December 1995 to study the Sun inside and out, SOHO was originally slated for a mission ending in 1998. Instead, it has far exceeded expectations—continuing to deliver valuable data, deepening our understanding of the Sun, and making groundbreaking discoveries, including the detection of more than 5,000 comets.

NASA’s solar research is far from over. Soon, three new spacecraft—developed by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—will expand our ability to study the Sun’s influence across the solar system. Scheduled for launch no earlier than Tuesday, Sept. 23, the missions include NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP), NASA’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, and NOAA’s Space Weather Follow On–Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) spacecraft.