Scientists, from behind their workstations, can retarget and repro- gram their experiments in a matter of minutes in response to events on the Sun. We expect this facility to be used more fre- quently as solar activity increases. SOHO coordinated observations, now and in a new mission SOHO was designed so that there would be significant coordina- tion between the onboard instruments and between SOHO and ground based instruments.
Coordinated observations come in various scales and formats.
These campaigns are most often coordinated from the SOHO EOF at Goddard, with instantaneous exchange of observing plans, schedules, targets, and quicklook data, via the SOHO Web pages. Smaller, more informal collaborations between SOHO experiments, a few GBO's, and often Yohkoh -SXT, are run routinely several times a week. There are also frequent intercalibrations between the SOHO experiments, occasionally supported with rocket underflights, and sometimes using well-calibrated stars as they pass near the Sun. SOHO campaigns vary in duration from 1 hour to several hours a day for more than a week. Typically 4 to 12 hours per day are devoted to joint observations of some sort.