RHESSI made 6 passes per day of 9.2 minutes average duration over the primary ground station located at UC Berkeley.  An average data volume of 11 Gbytes/day were downlinked at a rate of 4 MBytes/day.  The ground station at UCB was used for primary command and data reception.  The Mission Operations Center (MOC) at UCB operated the spacecraft and instrument.

The RHESSI data were sent to UCB's Science Operations Center (SOC).  At the SOC,  the data was catalogued, archived, and cut onto CD-ROMs.  The CD-ROMs were then distributed to co-investigators, Solar Data Analysis Center at Goddard Space Flight Center, High Energy Data Center at ETH in Zurich, and of course, the local archive at UC Berkeley.   From the local archive, the RHESSI data was distributed to the world-wide web.  The SDAC archived and distributed both data analysis software to outside users in the U.S. and provided contextual observations from other spacecraft and ground instruments.  The HEDC performed the same function in Europe.

Mission Operations Scientist Manfred Bester will take you through the new ground station built on-site for the RHESSI mission at the Space Sciences Laboratory in Berkeley.  Real Video - Hi or Low Bandwidth. [Transcript] (Get the Plug-In! If you can't play our video clips you may need to update or install the Real Player)

Last updated 02/01/2010 © UC Regents