From: Craig DeForest, SOHO/MDI Resident Observer AAS/SPD Press Officer

It was with some alarm and not a little chagrin that I read your note and Mitch Battros's coverage of the large solar event on 1 June 1999.

As the person who wrote the press release that the BBC picked up, I can assure you that there was no cover-up on NASA's (or anyone's) part.  In  fact, when we saw the event on the live telemetry feed at the Chicago meeting of the American Astronomical Society, those of us interested in public outreach were excited that we might be able to predict an aurora in
three days.  We set to work immediately, chasing down actual images of the disk of the Sun from observatories around the world, to determine whether the coronal mass ejection was coming toward or away from the Earth (the coronagraph images don't distinguish; one has to examine the actual surface of the Sun to determine whether an event is from the front face).

We determined at the meeting (independently of the NOAA Space Weather people, who had already come to the same conclusion) that the event wasn't coming toward the Earth, and hence might not be as exciting as we initially thought -- in fact, I was surprised (and, admittedly, pleased) when the BBC did decide to pick up the coverage anyway.

Though I'm writing to you from my personal email account, I must admit that I am an "insider" to much of the solar work that's going on at NASA: I operate one of the instruments aboard the SOHO spacecraft that recorded the solar burst. (Note that the BBC incorrectly identified the burst in their photo -- the bright, speckly "ray" emanating from the Sun in their picture is in fact part of the telescope itself.) Feel free to believe me or not -- but there is little or no connection, at the operational and public relations level, between the Cassini team and the solar physics and space weather organizations within NASA.  We SOHO people are busy enough deciding what to look at, filing and disseminating data, and analysing our results to take part in some vast conspiracy regarding Cassini.

Several groups have accused NASA, at different times, of harboring large conspiracies -- some of the recent ones involved Hale-Bopp and an alleged giant solar flare that would envelop the Earth.  I get a lot of personal chuckle value out of such things, because I can't imagine any of the scientists I work with (and I work with the SOHO operations team -- the people who collect solar data, operate the instruments, and make the decisions about how to disseminate the  images) voluntarily working in secrecy.  Getting scientists to work together is like herding kittens: we're individualistic enough that it's hard to get us to stick together even for something we believe in.  The concept of solar physicists actively trying to hide something we believed to be
dangerous -- well, it's laughable.

As far as "Sharon B."'s comment that the 10-day solar animation at http://www.spaceweather.com/java/solar-anim.html
is missing June 1 -- I suspect that something broke in the automated data pipeline over memorial day; we certainly were collecting data then, and I notice that they are publicly available in the database. I invite you or anyone else to visit the instrument sites at http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov and request data directly -- even large collections of data are only modestly sized by today's standards, and you can view them directly on your home computer with Photoshop or
other image manipulation software.

Please feel free to forward this to Mitch Battros: I don't have his email address, and I believe it addresses his plea for responses.

Warm regards,

Craig DeForest
SOHO/MDI Resident Observer
AAS/SPD Press Officer
<zowie@deforest.org>