The Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUVI) instrument designed and built at the Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory of the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center (ATC) in Palo Alto, Calif., will return stereo images of the Sun’s corona as part of NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO). STEREO will utilize two nearly identical spacecraft on different trajectories to study the most energetic events on the surface and in the lower atmosphere of the Sun, and their travel through interplanetary space.

Data from spacecraft instruments will allow scientists to construct the first ever three-dimensional views of the Sun, providing a new perspective on Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs). CMEs are violent explosions on the surface of the Sun that can propel as much as 10 billion tons of the Sun’s atmosphere-at a million miles an hour-out through the corona and into space.

EUVI is one element of an instrument suite on each STEREO spacecraft called SECCHI-the Sun-Earth Connection Coronal and Heliospheric Investigation-under the direction of Principal Investigator Dr. Russell Howard of the Naval Research Laboratory of Washington, D.C. SECCHI comprises a suite of telescopes, including three white-light coronagraphs and EUVI.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. manages the STEREO mission. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., designed and built the spacecraft. The laboratory will maintain command and control of the observatories throughout the mission, while NASA tracks and receives the data, determines the orbit of the satellites, and coordinates the scientific results.