Seoul: A solar coronagraph jointly developed by South Korea and the United States has successfully docked at the International Space Station (ISS) to carry out its mission of observing the sun and its outer atmosphere, or corona, Seoul's national space agency said Wednesday.According to Yonhap News Agency, a vessel carrying the Coronal Diagnostic Experiment (CODEX), a collaboration between the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute and the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), docked to the space station at 11:52 p.m. on Tuesday. This event took place approximately 12 hours after CODEX was launched aboard SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, as reported by the Korea AeroSpace Administration (KASA).The coronagraph is set to be installed at one of the ISS' Express Logistics Carriers using NASA's robot arm over the weekend. It will observe the sun and its corona for up to 55 minutes per 90-minute Earth orbit for up to two years. CODEX is noted as the wo rld's first coronagraph designed to observe the temperature and velocity of the solar wind in addition to the density, and it will produce two-dimensional video footage of these observations. KASA highlighted that this will aid researchers in better understanding the solar wind and predicting space weather.The solar wind, a constant stream of particles and magnetic fields released from the sun's outermost atmospheric layer, plays a significant role in affecting the weather in space. CODEX has been assigned two main tasks: understanding what heats the solar wind to temperatures millions of degrees hotter than the sun's surface and testing models that illustrate this heating and accelerating region.Kang Hyun-woo, the head of the space science exploration program at KASA, remarked, "The successful launch of CODEX, a next-generation coronagraph, will bring an important development in the space weather forecast and related studies."
- October 12, 2026
