March 4, 2003

All spacecraft subsystems are nominal. Over the week of February 20 – 26, thirty-three ground contacts were performed. Starting Monday, March 3, these contacts were reduced to two per day for the remainder of the 5-year SORCE mission. All science instruments are currently collecting data, and performing early orbit calibration experiments. On Thursday, March 6, these calibrations will finish and the normal operational scenarios started.

Since launch on January 25, the SORCE Mission Operations Center has routinely delivered raw telemetry data to the Goddard Space Flight Center Earth Sciences Distributed Active Archive Center (GES DAAC) for permanent archival. The SORCE science data system is now online and started generating preliminary solar data for all SORCE instruments using pre-launch calibration data. The first public release of SORCE science data will occur late May 2003.