A main focus of the TRACE instrument is the fine structure of coronal loops low in the solar atmosphere.

TRACE is the third spacecraft in the Small Explorer program, launched on 2 April 1998, and obtained its last science image on 21 June 2010, at 23:56 UTC.

[3] The Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) is a NASA small explorer mission designed to examine the three-dimensional magnetic structures which emerge through the Sun's photosphere (the visible surface of the Sun) and define both the geometry and dynamics of the upper solar atmosphere (the transition region and corona).

In science mode, the spacecraft uses an instrument-provided guide telescope as a fine guidance sensor to provide a pointing accuracy of less than 5 arcseconds.

Power is provided to the spacecraft through the use of four panels of gallium arsenide (GaAs) solar cells with a total area of 2 m2 (22 sq ft).

The telescope has a 30 cm (12 in) aperture and 1024 × 1024 charge-coupled device (CCD) detector giving an 8.5 arcminute field of view (FoV).

The telescope is designed to take correlated images in a range of wavelengths from visible light through the Lyman alpha line to far ultraviolet.