{"id":678,"date":"2011-10-26T09:07:51","date_gmt":"2011-10-26T09:07:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress65\/?p=678"},"modified":"2011-10-26T09:07:51","modified_gmt":"2011-10-26T09:07:51","slug":"stereo-and-stereo-b","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/stereo-and-stereo-b\/","title":{"rendered":"STEREO-A and STEREO-B"},"content":{"rendered":"

I haven’t had a lot of space history posts recently. I try to limit myself to anniversaries in multiples of 5 years, to keep from repeating things, and to keep the pace from getting overwhelming. I also try not to include “routine” events like the launch of the Nth in a series of satellites … not that anything about space operations has become truly routine, of course. But here’s one for the record:<\/p>\n

Five years ago today — October 26, 2006 — a Delta 2 rocket out of Cape Canaveral placed two solar observatories in orbit.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n(STEREO spacecraft. NASA image.)<\/em><\/p>\n

\nThe Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory consisted of two identical spacecraft, STEREO-A<\/a> and STEREO-B<\/a>. Once in space, the two satellites were allowed to drift into different heliocentric orbits: STEREO-B ahead of the Earth (leading), and STEREO-A behind the Earth (lagging). From those vantage points, their observations could be combined to image the Sun “stereographically” and predict whether a coronal mass ejection was heading toward the Earth.<\/p>\n

On February 6th of this year, STEREO A and B reached 180 degrees of separation, which “enabled, for the first time, the simultaneous observation of the entire Sun.”<\/p>\n

In other news<\/strong>, I’m heading to the World Fantasy Convention<\/a> today. Folks have been urging me to go to WFC for years; it’s a small convention, primarily of SF&F professionals. It seems a little odd to think of myself as an SF&F professional in my own right, but my 3rd and 4th professional sales are forthcoming: more on those later, when the contracts are signed (or when the editors give me the okay).<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>by <\/span>\"feather\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I haven’t had a lot of space history posts recently. I try to limit myself to anniversaries in multiples of 5 years, to keep from repeating things, and to keep the pace from getting overwhelming. I also try not to include “routine” events like the launch of the Nth in \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[57,164,26,20,11],"class_list":["post-678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-convention","tag-fantasy","tag-launch","tag-remote-sensing","tag-space-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}