Authors: Natsuha Kuroda (George Mason University), Arnaud Thernisien (Naval Research Laboratory), Dimitrios Vassiliadis (NOAA), Damien Chua (Naval Research Laboratory), Tim Carter (Naval Research Laboratory), Nathan Rich (Naval Research Laboratory), Mario Noya (Naval Research Laboratory), Tim Babich (Naval Research Laboratory), Larry Gardner (Space Systems Research Corporation), Laura Balmaceda (George Mason University)

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has funded the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory to develop, build, and test the CCOR series of operational solar coronagraphs.

CCOR stands for Compact Coronagraph. It is a series of white-light solar coronagraphs that are dedicated to performing space weather forecasts. It will be used by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) to detect coronal mass ejections (CMEs), determine their trajectory, mass, and speed, with the goal of predicting any geo-effective impact at Earth, or elsewhere in the solar system. The CCOR-1 data were made publicly available by NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI) around April 2025.

The first CCOR, CCOR-1, is installed on the Solar Pointing Platform (SPP) of the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite series, GOES, iteration U. GOES-U was launched on June 25, 2024, and was soon renamed GOES-19 after it reached geostationary orbit. CCOR-2 is installed on the SWFO-L1 spacecraft, scheduled for launch in late 2025, and targeted to be in a Lissajous orbit around the L1 Lagrange point. Finally, a CCOR-3 is planned to be on board the European Space Agency Vigil spacecraft that will orbit around the L5 Lagrange point, scheduled for launch in 2031.

The first lights of CCOR-1 were captured on September 19, 2024, and images have been steadily flowing since then. CCOR-1 became fully operational on April 2025, after GOES-19 reached its operational location, replacing GOES-16/GOES-East. In this presentation, we provide a short description of the CCOR instrument design and specifications, as well as a comparison of the specifications with existing coronagraphs such as LASCO and PUNCH NFI. We present a sample of movies of CME events captured up until these days. We discuss the Earth shine stray-light, a limitation of the CCOR-1 instrument due to the GOES-19 geostationary orbit.

Acknowledgements: This work is sponsored by NOAA.

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