14 DAY TRIAL // The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) is the first component of the American space agency's Living With a Star Program. The goal of this initiative is to produce viable, high-accuracy data of the reasons that underlie the formation of magnetic solar storms. Various manifestations of the Sun, including solar winds, are extremely dangerous for our satellites and power grids, as well as for the astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS). The objective is now within reach, as SDO has already began relaying information its instruments collect, Nature News reports.
The observatory was launched on February 11, and has become operational in late April. NASA paid a total price tag of $856 million for the entire mission, including the five planned years of operations. At this week's Committee on Space Research meeting, held in Bremen, Germany, NASA astronomers presented the first results obtained after refining raw data beamed back by the SDO. The spacecraft features six, 16-megapixel cameras. Every second, at least one of these instruments beams back an image of the Sun, so one could argue that the star is constantly under surveillance.
But receiving such vast amount of information is not necessarily a good thing, experts say. “Because of the sheer size of the treasure trove of data we are getting from SDO, it will require the entire scientific community to sift though and make the connections that advance the science,”explains University of Colorado expert Frank Eparvier. The observatory has instruments that analyzes the movements of ionized gases in the Sun's atmosphere, telescopes that keep an eye on the corona, and spectrographs that analyze temperature variations. Other instruments are especially suited for observing the star in extreme ultraviolet (EUV) wavelengths, which help better characterize solar activity patterns.
“The Sun is a major part of our everyday lives. The biggest thing about SDO is that it's enabling the prediction of space weather,” explained SDO project scientist Dean Pesnell, who is based at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Even small events restructure large regions of the solar surface. It's been possible to recognize the size of these regions because of the combination of spatial, temporal and area coverage provided by [the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly instrument],” adds the SDO AIA principal investigator, Alan Title. He works at the Palo Alto, California-based Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center.
“Now that SDO has begun mission operations, we’re doing what the mission was designed to do. Our job now is to execute the requirements on a daily basis, to fly, operate, and do the day-to-day commanding, to collect the data, and to distribute it to the scientists,” added GSFC Space Science Mission Operations mission manager Patrick Crouse