To RHESSI fans:

RHESSI made 16 years of X-ray and gamma-ray observations before the mission ended in 2018 due to loss of communications.  Although the spacecraft has continued to orbit the Earth since then, it is expected to finally re-enter the atmosphere very soon and burn up, possibly as soon as tomorrow!  Here is NASA’s press release:

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-retired-solar-energy-imager-spacecraft-to-reenter-atmosphere

Pascal Saint-Hilaire and Hugh Hudson wrote a RHESSI nugget on the re-entry, including plots of the ground path underneath RHESSI for the next couple of days.  With luck, you may be able to catch a glimpse of RHESSI as it burns up, while some parts of the observatory – notably the tungsten grids – may even survive re-entry.

https://sprg.ssl.berkeley.edu/~tohban/wiki/index.php/RHESSI%27s_Re-entry

I encourage you all to commemorate and celebrate RHESSI’s long mission, which can include analyzing some portion of RHESSI’s gigantic data set.  I also recommend that you register for the upcoming SPHERE workshop (June 20–23), which builds off of the legacy of RHESSI:

https://sphere.boulder.swri.edu/

Thanks!

Albert Y. Shih

RHESSI Deputy Mission Scientist