How many and what types of instruments are onboard the observatories?
Each twin STEREO observatory carries two instruments and two instrument suites. This combination provides a total of 16 instruments per observatory. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, in Laurel, Md., designed and built the spacecraft platform that houses the instruments. INSTRUMENT SUITES The Sun-Earth Connection Coronal and Heliospheric Investigation (SECCHI) is a suite of remote-sensing instruments consisting of an extreme ultraviolet imager, two white-light coronagraphs, and a heliospheric imager. These instruments will study the 3-D evolution of coronal mass ejections–the most energetic eruptions on the sun and primary cause of major geomagnetic storms–from their origin at the sun’s surface through the corona and interplanetary medium to their eventual impact at Earth. The principal investigator for the SECCHI instrument suite is Russell Howard of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. The In situ Measurements of PArticles and CME Transients (IMPA
