Seven Days:The news in brief

摘要

NASA's latest solar mission reached orbit safely on 27 June. The Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph was released by an Orbital Sciences Pegasus XL rocket, which was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Lompoc, California. The US$181-million spacecraft carries a 20-centimetre ultraviolet telescope and spectrograph, designed to probe the layers of the Sun between its bright surface and its outer atmosphere, or corona (see Nature 498,279-280; 2013).