NRL conducts a broad Program of scientific research, technology and advanced development. Several coronal mass ejections are also seen as visible puffs of gas. Coronal mass ejections are the hurricanes of space weather. SOHO is ideally placed and instrumented to report and even anticipate their origins in the Sun's atmosphere. It masks the intense rays from the Sun's disk in order to reveal the much fainter glow of the outer solar atmosphere, the corona.
Many stars are brighter than the gas, and they create the background scene.
ESA and the European aerospace industry built the spacecraft, and NASA launched it on December 2 1995. SOHO carries 12 sets of instruments provided by scientific teams, each led by a European or an American principal investigator. They study the solar interior by helioseismology, the solar atmosphere seen by ultraviolet and visible light, and the solar wind and energetic particles. Now when we say that the Sun is a typical star, and a key to understanding the whole universe, that is no longer a theoretical statement but something everyone can see. The quality of the images confirms that SOHO is the finest spacecraft ever devoted to the study of the Sun.