An Overview of the Orbiting Solar Laboratory

The Orbiting Solar Laboratory will be a free flying, polar orbiting complement of scientific instruments to observe the surface and upper atmosphere of the sun and to make precision measurements at high spatial and temporal resolution over a spectral range from the X-Ray to the near Infra-red. OSL contains a 1 meter telescope which feeds a narrowband tunable filter, a set of fixed broadband filters, and a spectrograph. These three instruments are mounted together in a common structure, share a unified science data and control system, and use a single image stabilization system for their common fields of view to form a Coordinated Instrument Package (CIP). An Ultraviolet Spectrograph and an XUV/X-ray imager are desired co-pointing instruments which have their own independent optical systems. The CIP and the copointing instruments operate with overlapping fields of view.