NASA Successfully Launches a New Eye on the Sun

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NASA Successfully Launches a New Eye on the Sun
UNITED STATES - 12 FEBRUARY 2010

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, lifted off Thursday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Launch Complex 41 on a first-of-a-kind mission to reveal the sun's inner workings in unprecedented detail. The launch aboard an Atlas V rocket occurred at 10:23 a.m. EST.

The most technologically advanced of NASA's heliophysics spacecraft, SDO will take images of the sun every 0.75 seconds and daily send back about 1.5 terabytes of data to Earth -- the equivalent of streaming 380 full-length movies.

"This is going to be sensational," said Richard R. Fisher, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "SDO is going to make a huge step forward in our understanding of the sun and its effects on life and society."

The sun's dynamic processes affect everyone and everything on Earth. SDO will explore activity on the sun that can disable satellites, cause power grid failures, and disrupt GPS communications. SDO also will provide a better understanding of the role the sun plays in Earth's atmospheric chemistry and climate.

SDO is the crown jewel in a fleet of NASA missions to study our sun. The mission is the cornerstone of a NASA science program called Living With A Star. This program will provide new understanding and information concerning the sun and solar system that directly affect Earth, its inhabitants and technology.

The SDO project is managed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. NASA's Launch Services Program at Kennedy Space Center managed the payload integration and launch.




Source: NASA

Video: NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory Launch:

 

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NASA's New Eye on the Sun Delivers Stunning 1st Images
UNITED STATES - 22 APRIL 2010

Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) is returning early images that confirm an unprecedented new capability for scientists to better understand our sun's dynamic processes

Washington, April 21, 2010 -- NASA's recently launched Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is returning early images that confirm an unprecedented new capability for scientists to better understand our sun's dynamic processes. These solar activities affect everything on Earth.

Some of the images from the spacecraft show never-before-seen detail of material streaming outward and away from sunspots. Others show extreme close-ups of activity on the sun's surface. The spacecraft also has made the first high-resolution measurements of solar flares in a broad range of extreme ultraviolet wavelengths.
"These initial images show a dynamic sun that I had never seen in more than 40 years of solar research," said Richard Fisher, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "SDO will change our understanding of the sun and its processes, which affect our lives and society. This mission will have a huge impact on science, similar to the impact of the Hubble Space Telescope on modern astrophysics."

Launched on Feb. 11, 2010, SDO is the most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the sun. During its five-year mission, it will examine the sun's magnetic field and also provide a better understanding of the role the sun plays in Earth's atmospheric chemistry and climate. Since launch, engineers have been conducting testing and verification of the spacecraft's components. Now fully operational, SDO will provide images with clarity 10 times better than high-definition television and will return more comprehensive science data faster than any other solar observing spacecraft.

SDO will determine how the sun's magnetic field is generated, structured and converted into violent solar events such as turbulent solar wind, solar flares and coronal mass ejections. These immense clouds of material, when directed toward Earth, can cause large magnetic storms in our planet's magnetosphere and upper atmosphere.

SDO will provide critical data that will improve the ability to predict these space weather events. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., built, operates and manages the SDO spacecraft for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

"I'm so proud of our brilliant work force at Goddard, which is rewriting science textbooks once again," said Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., chairwoman of the Commerce, Justice and Science Appropriations Subcommittee that funds NASA. "This time Goddard is shedding new light on our closest star, the sun, discovering new information about powerful solar flares that affect us here on Earth by damaging communication satellites and temporarily knocking out power grids. Better data means more accurate solar storm warnings."

Space weather has been recognized as a cause of technological problems since the invention of the telegraph in the 19th century. These events produce disturbances in electromagnetic fields on Earth that can induce extreme currents in wires, disrupting power lines and causing widespread blackouts. These solar storms can interfere with communications between ground controllers, satellites and airplane pilots flying near Earth's poles. Radio noise from the storm also can disrupt cell phone service.

SDO will send 1.5 terabytes of data back to Earth each day, which is equivalent to a daily download of half a million songs onto an MP3 player. The observatory carries three state-of the-art instruments for conducting solar research.

The Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager maps solar magnetic fields and looks beneath the sun's opaque surface. The experiment will decipher the physics of the sun's activity, taking pictures in several very narrow bands of visible light. Scientists will be able to make ultrasound images of the sun and study active regions in a way similar to watching sand shift in a desert dune. The instrument's principal investigator is Phil Scherrer of Stanford University. HMI was built by a collaboration of Stanford University and the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, Calif.

The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly is a group of four telescopes designed to photograph the sun's surface and atmosphere. The instrument covers 10 different wavelength bands, or colors, selected to reveal key aspects of solar activity. These types of images will show details never seen before by scientists. The principal investigator is Alan Title of the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory, which built the instrument.

The Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment measures fluctuations in the sun's radiant emissions. These emissions have a direct and powerful effect on Earth's upper atmosphere -- heating it, puffing it up, and breaking apart atoms and molecules. Researchers don't know how fast the sun can vary at many of these wavelengths, so they expect to make discoveries about flare events. The principal investigator is Tom Woods of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. LASP built the instrument.

"These amazing images, which show our dynamic sun in a new level of detail, are only the beginning of SDO's contribution to our understanding of the sun," said SDO Project Scientist Dean Pesnell of Goddard.

SDO is the first mission of NASA's Living with a Star Program, or LWS, and the crown jewel in a fleet of NASA missions that study our sun and space environment. The goal of LWS is to develop the scientific understanding necessary to address those aspects of the connected sun-Earth system that directly affect our lives and society.

Source : NASA

 

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NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory - Most Advanced Spacecraft Studies the Sun

 

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Lockheed Martin-Developed Tool Enables Scientists To Efficiently Utilize Massive Data Stream From NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory
UNITED STATES - 26 MAY 2010

PALO ALTO, California May 26th, 2010 -- The immense volume of data generated by the suite of instruments on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) requires new tools for efficient identifying and accessing data that is most relevant to research investigations. Scientists at the Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory of the Lockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT] Advanced Technology Center (ATC) in Palo Alto have developed the Heliophysics Events Knowledgebase (HEK) to fill this need.

The HEK system combines automated data mining using feature detection methods and high-performance visualization systems for data markup. In addition, web services and clients are provided for searching the resulting metadata, reviewing results and efficiently accessing the data.

“We have so much high-resolution data from SDO that we need to make sure that we don’t miss anything important. As a comparison, SDO generates as much data in a single day as our Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) instrument – launched in 1998 – produces in five years,” said Dr. Neal Hurlburt, Lockheed Martin astrophysicist and head of the Solar Software Group at the ATC. “The HEK tool enables us to characterize significant features and events that will be of interest to solar physicists, and make these data subsets easily accessible.”

The HEK is designed to catalog interesting solar events and features and to present them to members of the solar physics community in such a way that guides them to the most relevant data for their purposes. This is a problem of data markup that is arising in many scientific and other fields. For example, the Monterrey Bay Aquarium Research Institute developed a similar system for annotating and cataloging video sequences of ocean fauna and activities, and various sports leagues have systems for cataloging clips of athletic events. The distinguishing factor for SDO is the large image format and complex event types.

The HEK was developed as an integrated metadata system designed with the following goals in mind:

• To help researchers find data sets relevant for their topics of interest,
• To serve as an open forum where solar and/or heliospheric features and events can be reported and annotated,
• To facilitate discovery of statistical trends and/or relationships between different classes of features and events,
• And to lighten the load on the SDO data system in terms of providing access to subsets of data that would be too large to transmit over the Internet.

To achieve these goals, HEK consists of registries to store metadata pertaining to observational sequences (the Heliophysics Coverage Registry, or HCR), to heliophysical events (Heliophysics Events Registry, or HER), as well as browse products such as movies. Interfaces for communications and querying between the different registries are also provided as web services.

The design and implementation of the HEK and its interfaces allow expansion beyond its primary function as a searchable database that contains metadata on solar events and on the observation sets from which these are derived. It can track temporary data products that users may wish to have online for a limited period. It is also possible to include numerical data sets based on assimilated observations, or even such data sets and events within them. In addition, it can also contain information on papers published based on certain data sets and events within them, so that for any given event users can be pointed to such publications, or likewise for a given publication users can be pointed to one or more data sets from one or more observatories.

Lockheed Martin developed the HEK system to address the immediate needs of SDO. However, the underlying motivation of devising a means for coping with enormous data sets resonates with many other missions and projects throughout modern science, and HEK could serve as a model.

Two of the SDO instruments were built at the Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory of the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center (ATC) in Palo Alto. The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA), a suite of four telescopes, provides an unprecedented view of the solar corona, taking images that span at least 1.3 solar diameters in multiple wavelengths nearly simultaneously, at a resolution of 0.6 arc-seconds and at a cadence of 10 seconds or better. The Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI), designed in collaboration with Professor Philip Scherrer, HMI Principal Investigator, and other scientists at Stanford University, studies the origin of solar variability and attempts to characterize and understand the Sun’s interior and magnetic activity. The third SDO instrument, the Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment (EVE), measures fluctuations in the Sun’s ultraviolet output. EVE was built by the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado.

The goal of SDO is to understand – striving towards a predictive capability – the solar variations that influence life on Earth and humanity’s technological systems. The mission seeks to determine how the Sun’s magnetic field is generated and structured, and how this stored magnetic energy is converted and released into the heliosphere and geospace in the form of solar wind, energetic particles, and variations in the solar irradiance.

SDO is the first mission and crown jewel in a fleet of NASA missions to study our Sun. The mission is the cornerstone of a NASA science program called Living With a Star (LWS). The goal of the LWS Program is to develop the scientific understanding necessary to address those aspects of the Sun and solar system that directly affect life and society.

The Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory at the ATC has a 47-year-long heritage of spaceborne solar instruments including the Soft X-ray Telescope on the Japanese Yohkoh satellite, the Michelson Doppler Imager on the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, the solar telescope on NASA’s Transition Region and Coronal Explorer, the Solar X-ray Imager on the GOES-N, -O and -P environmental satellites, the Focal Plane Package on Hinode and an Extreme Ultraviolet Imager on each of the two spacecraft in NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory. The laboratory also conducts basic research into understanding and predicting space weather and the behavior of the Sun including its impacts on Earth and climate.

The ATC is the research and development organization of Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company (LMSSC). LMSSC, a major operating unit of Lockheed Martin Corporation, designs and develops, tests, manufactures and operates a full spectrum of advanced-technology systems for national security and military, civil government and commercial customers. Chief products include human space flight systems; a full range of remote sensing, navigation, meteorological and communications satellites and instruments; space observatories and interplanetary spacecraft; laser radar; ballistic missiles; missile defense systems; and nanotechnology research and development.


Source: Lockheed Martin