ACE (Advanced Composition Explorer)

Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE). Credit: NASA

A NASA satellite designed to measure the elemental and isotopic composition of matter from several different sources, including the solar corona and the interstellar medium.

ACE was placed in a halo orbit around the first Lagrangian point (L1) of the Earth-Sun system, about 1.4 million km from Earth. It carries six high-resolution sensors and three monitoring instruments for sampling low-energy particles of solar origin and high-energy galactic particles with a collecting power 10–1,000 times greater than previous experiments. The spacecraft can give advance warning, of about one hour, of geomagnetic storms that might overload power grids, disrupt communications, and pose a hazard to astronauts.

launch date	Aug. 25, 1997
launch vehicle	Delta 7920
launch site	Cape Canaveral
orbit	halo
mass at launch	785 kg

External site

Advanced Composition Explorer homepage (Caltech)

Related category

• SATELLITES AND SPACE PROBES

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