Speaker
Description
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) sponsored the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory to develop, build, and test the CCOR series of operational solar coronagraphs.
CCOR stands for Compact Coronagraph. It is a series of three white-light solar coronagraphs that are dedicated to performing space weather forecasts. It is used by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) to detect Coronal Mass Ejections, determine their trajectory, mass, and speed, in the goal of predicting any geo-effective impact at Earth, or elsewhere in the solar system.
The first CCOR of the series, CCOR-1, is installed on the Solar Pointing Platform (SPP) of the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite series, GOES, iteration U. GOES-U was launched on June 25, 2024, and is now renamed GOES-19/GOES-East. CCOR-2 is installed on the SWFO-L1 spacecraft, scheduled for launch in the fall of 2025, and targeted to be in a Lissajous orbit around the L1 Lagrange point. Finally, CCOR-3 will be on board the European Space Agency’s Vigil spacecraft that will orbit around the L5 Lagrange point, scheduled for launch in 2031.
The first lights of CCOR-1 were captured on September 19, 2024, and images have been steadily flowing since then. After 6 months commissioning of the spacecraft and instruments, CCOR-1 started its nominal operational mission on April 2025. after GOES-19 reached its operational location, replacing GOES-16/GOES-Est. Real time CCOR-1 data are publicly available on NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center’s website.
In this presentation, we provide a description of the CCOR instrument design and specifications, including the specificities of the CCOR-3 version that will be on board ESA’s Vigil mission. We compare the design and data with other coronagraphs such as LASCO, STEREO SECCHI COR2, and PUNCH NFI. Using real and proxy data of the CCORs, we discuss the advantages of having two or even multiple points of view of the Sun and its corona.
