The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft will extend its mission for at least three more years, thanks to new funding.

The Sun-monitoring mission, jointly operated by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), left the Earth over a decade ago, and  was originally planned to operate until April of 2007. “This mission extension will allow SOHO to cement its position as the most important spacecraft in the history of solar physics,” says Bernhard Fleck, SOHO’s project scientist. “There is a lot of valuable work for this spacecraft still to do.”

SOHO has imaged the far side of the Sun and recorded seismic ripples on the solar surface during the last ten years. The spacecraft's crowning achievement was the Bastille Day event, when, on 14 July 2000, it captured images of a particularly violent solar storm.

SOHO-related scientific papers have been generated by this project every working day for the past two years. It will soon be joined by five new Sun-observing spacecraft, expected to launch between now and 2008.