NASA Celebrates 10 Years of Staring Into the Damn Sun

YOU KNOW THE deal with the sun: Don’t look right at it. Don’t fly too close to it. Pretty basic stuff. Not that NASA heeds that advice. For 10 years now, two spacecraft have been orbiting our nearest star, staring into it to unravel its secrets. The region between Earth and the sun, a distance of some 93 million miles, teems with solar flares and solar wind and charged particles. The two Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory probes, dubbed Stereo A and Stereo B, follow orbits just ahead and behind the Earth to provide a stereoscopic view of it all.

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