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The Yohkoh Soft X-ray Telescope (SXT) emerged from a very
perceptive and constructive collaborative agreement between
Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) and
the USA National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to
cooperate on an ISAS mission to study high-energy processes in
the sun's atmosphere. The SXT itself was conceived and built by
the National Observatory of Japan and the Lockheed Martin Solar
and Astrophysics Laboratory. The scientific planning for SXT,
and its operation, has involved scientific groups in Japan and
the USA. A very strong SXT team priority lay with the early
implementation of a comprehensive software system for data
handling and analysis. This subsequently evolved into the
familiar and powerful SolarSoft system now in use by many solar
groups for a large variety of experiments.
The Yohkoh launch (August, 1991) gave us the first solar soft
X-ray telescope equipped with a CCD camera: SXT. Although SXT's
angular resolution is comparable to the Skylab telescopes, its
performance is quite uniform over the entire sun, it has much
lower scattered light, much more telemetry, and most
importantly, the CCD itself. Such a detector is inherently
linear and stable, and (much to our pleasure) robust; it is
still going strong ten years later. Almost each day its images
bring new thrills, especially since Yohkoh has survived into its
second solar maximum. With time we've learned much better how to
observe flares and CMEs with a soft X-ray telescope.
Additional information available at
"http://soi.stanford.edu/results/SolPhys200/Hudson/introduction.html"
[Summary provided by Stanford University]
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