HELIOS
Solar Weather Observatory

STATION HELIOS-01 · L1 HALO ORBIT · 1.5 × 10⁶ KM SUNWARD

The nearest star,
under continuous watch.

HELIOS renders the Sun's weather as it arrives — granulation, flares, wind — from a halo orbit upstream of Earth. What you see left the photosphere five seconds ago.

FEED NOMINAL LIGHT DELAY 4.98 s the disc accepts input — press it
01

Telemetry

X-ray flux · W/m² (log)
−66 s0.3 s cadence · 66 s windownow
Solar wind speed · km/s
−66 sSIEVE plasma analysernow
5,772 K at the surface.
15,700,000 K at the core.

Effective photospheric temperature vs. modelled core temperature. The corona, unexplained, runs a thousand times hotter than the surface beneath it.

02

Observation log

TimeEventClassRegionNote
03

Instrument suite

Extreme-UV imager

IRIS-E

Images the corona at 17.1 nm every 12 seconds. The seething disc above is its feed — granulation cells the size of France, resolved and rendered.

Vector magnetograph

LODESTONE

Maps the photospheric magnetic field to a tenth of a gauss. When field lines shear and tangle, LODESTONE flags the region — hours before it snaps into a flare.

Coronagraph

OCCULT-2

Holds an artificial eclipse in permanent totality. With the disc blotted out, it watches coronal mass ejections leave the Sun at two thousand kilometres a second.

Particle suite

SIEVE

Counts protons and electrons as the wind blows through it. Sitting upstream at L1, it hands Earth roughly forty minutes of warning before a storm front lands.

04

72-hour forecast

QUIET Kp<4 ACTIVE Kp 4–5 STORM Kp≥5

Quiet, then unsettled. Background X-ray flux holds in the mid-C range as Region 4172 rotates toward disc centre, keeping a chance of isolated M-class flares through the period.

A recurrent coronal hole stream — CH 1233, the same structure that arrived last rotation — reaches Earth late on day two. Expect wind speeds near 620 km/s and active conditions, Kp 4 to 5, easing as the stream passes.

Aurora, if any, stays pinned to high latitudes. Perth sleeps through this one.