AeroVia Logo
AeroVia
Home
Resources
Courses
Community
About
Back to Missions

Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment

The Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment was a NASA Earth Observing System mission led and operated by the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. Its four instruments measured total solar irradiance and the Sun's spectral energy from X-rays through the near infrared, building climate-quality records of how solar output varies over days, rotations, and solar cycles.

Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment
NASA/LASP; James Acker and Rob Gutro/NASA Earth Observer · Exact subject/source match to NASA Earthdata’s SORCE mission image: the stored 684x469 asset is a re-encoded rendition of the NASA Earthdata 972x666 image at the direct source URL; bilinear pixel comparison MAE 2.465, RMSE 4.675, Pearson correlation 0.996026. Stored asset SHA-256: 0edee168b4c23ad82e817411610eaf057ddda1e07ecb604bab5c038ddd6de01c. NASA Earthdata identifies this as a NASA image and credits the image/caption to NASA/LASP and James Acker/Rob Gutro/NASA’s Earth Observer. NASA’s current Images and Media Usage Guidelines generally permit NASA content for factual, educational, and informational use with acknowledgement; commercial use must not imply NASA endorsement, and NASA logos, identifiers, separately identified third-party material, and recognizable-person rights remain subject to that policy. This is asset-level provenance and a conservative reuse basis, not a blanket license. · Source
Follow this mission

Alerts are unavailable because this mission is no longer active.

Identity

Aliases
SORCE2003-004A
Name
Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment
Status
completed

Details

Astronauts
-
Description
The Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment was a NASA Earth Observing System mission led and operated by the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. Its four instruments measured total solar irradiance and the Sun's spectral energy from X-rays through the near infrared, building climate-quality records of how solar output varies over days, rotations, and solar cycles.
Destination
Near-circular low Earth orbit at approximately 640 km altitude (40° inclination) for measuring incoming X-ray, ultraviolet, visible, near-infrared, and total solar radiation
End Date
2020-02-25
Launch Site
Outcome
SORCE operated for more than seventeen years, far beyond its planned five-year mission, and observed two solar-cycle minima. Its stable total and spectral irradiance measurements became important inputs to climate, atmospheric-energy-balance, and remote-sensing models. After overlapping with the successor TSIS-1 record, the team deliberately passivated SORCE on February 25, 2020.
Programs
Start Date
2003-01-25
Vehicle Families

Links

Official Url
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/sorce/

Assets & Meta

Creation Time
July 18, 2026 at 16:27:05 UTC
Updated Time
August 23, 2026 at 02:31:46 UTC
Image
Download

Other

Affiliations
Search Name
Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment SORCE 2003-004A
Space Stations
-
Vehicles