At some point Greg Kopp just got tired of the questions. Every time the solar physicist showed a plot of the Sun's total radiation output as measured by a succession of satellites since 1978, he had to explain an unexpectedly large offset starting around 2003. That was the year NASA's Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) was launched (see 'Mission control'), carrying a new type of sensor developed by Kopp and his team at the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder.
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