TRACE, or the Transition Region and Coronal Explorer is a NASA space telescope designed to provide high resolution images and observation of the solar photosphere and transition region to the corona.
The satellite, launched in April 1998, has a 30 cm aperture and 1024 x 1024 CCD detector giving an 8.5 arc minute field of view. The telescope is designed to take correlated images in a range of wavelengths from visible light, through the Lyman alpha line to far ultraviolet. The different wavelength passbands correspond to plasma emission temperatures from 4,000 to 4,000,000 K.
TRACE is a SMEX or Small Explorer mission.
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