RHESSI Operations

The RHESSI Mission and Science Operations Center (MSOC) is located at Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) on the Campus of the University of California at Berkeley.  Communication with the spacecraft is established six times per day via the Berkeley Ground Station to monitor spacecraft health and safety, and to retrieve science and engineering data.

RHESSI operations are largely autonomous.  The main operations task is the management of the on-board solid-state recorder (SSR) during periods of high solar activity or when sufficient ground station dumps are not available to keep the SSR from filling up.  A 'Tohban', a rotating weekly position shared by team scientists, monitors solar activity and the instrument operation daily to ensure that the observations are being taken to maximize the scientific return.

Once the instrument data are recorded in the SSR, it takes up to two days to be telemetered to the ground station.  Once at the ground station, the packetized data files are converted to FITS format and distributed to the RHESSI data archives at Goddard and Switzerland.  The data are generally available for analysis from one to three days after the observation is made.

Operations Links

Tohban Manual - List of tohban duties and useful links

Last RHESSI Spacecraft and Instrument Status from 27-Oct-2018 - Temperatures, voltages, and status of spacecraft and instrument components on last day of RHESSI mission

Weekly RHESSI Tohban Reports

State-of-Health Data - Plots and text files of 1-day averages of temperatures, voltages, and more for the entire mission

Detector Resolution - Explanation and plot showing changes in RHESSI detector resolution over time and energy

Detector Efficiency - Changes in RHESSI detector efficiency over time

Table of Anneal and Offpoint Times

Altitude / Velocity Plots - Plots of RHESSI altitude, altitude decay rate, velocity, and SFU for entire mission

Temperature plots - Plots of RHESSI temperature, efficiency, power, latest month, latest 2 weeks, latest 4 months


Records of Changes