A new NASA spacecraft called the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) will deliver startling images of the sun with ten times more detail than HDTV. The goal of the mission is to help scientists zoom in on solar activity such as sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections, thus improving forcasts of solar storms. The complete script is available. For more information on the Solar Dynamics Observatory, check out their web site at http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov. ||

These animations and web shorts explain how SDO's instruments will look at the sun and allow us to better predict how the sun will affect us in the future. ||

Scientists discover what there is, but engineers create that which never was. This special group of folks at Goddard Space Flight Center are creators, like any artist, but instead of working with art they are working wiht scientific, mechanical, or electrical things with fantastic problems to solve. Watch engineers talk about what it is like to be an engineer as they build, assemble, integrate, and test the Solary Dynamics Observatory (SDO) soon to be launched in early 2010. If you have a strong tendancy towards science and mathematics, and enjoy working and building things with your hands, then you could also come up with creative solutions, to create something, to do a certain job and do it well. ||

Music Video - NASA's Solar Dyamics Observatory (SDO) will help scientists to better understand solar variability and aid in predictions of space weather. The new Ka band antennas at the White Sands Testing Facility in New Mexico will be the go-between the satellite and the SDO Mission Operations Contol Center. ||

Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) will dramatically increase our ability to collect data about the Sun. This visualization compares the temporal and spatial resolution of SOHO/EIT with TRACE. SDO will enable TRACE-like image and temporal resolution over the entire solar disk. This movie opens with a full-disk view of the Sun in ultraviolet light (195 angstroms) from SOHO/EIT using the traditional TRACE 'gold' color table. We zoom in on the active region on the western limb where the TRACE instrument is pointing and fade-in an inset of the higher-resolution TRACE data. To emphasize the comparison, the TRACE inset is moved aside (with a solid white border) revealing the matching EIT data view (enclosed in the faint white border). At this point, we step through the time series of data frames. In this movie, much of the TRACE imagery is collected at time intervals between 3 and 40 seconds. On the other hand, a new SOHO/EIT image is taken about every 12 minutes (720 seconds). The SDO Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) will take full-disk solar images at four times the SOHO/EIT spatial resolution, a whopping 4096x4096, and at least 70 times the temporal resolution, 10 seconds or better per image. This creates a data rate over 1000x higher than SOHO/EIT. It is roughly equivalent to TRACE spatial and temporal resolution, but over the entire solar disk. ||

The sun is BIG and to study such a huge and active subject requires an incredible amount of data. The mission up to the task is NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a spacecraft built to send back 150 mbs of data per second, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.For complete transcript, click here. || SDO_Data_Path_ipodLG.00402_print.jpg (1024x576) [51.9 KB] || SDO_Data_Path_ipodLG_web.png (320x180) [92.7 KB] || SDO_Data_Path_ipodLG_thm.png (80x40) [12.5 KB] || SDO_Data_Path_appletv.webmhd.webm (960x540) [13.0 MB] || SDO_Data_Path_h264.mov (1280x720) [33.0 MB] || SDO_Data_Path_appletv.m4v (960x720) [31.5 MB] || SDO_datapath_prores.mov (1280x720) [865.7 MB] || SDO_Data_Path_ipodLG.m4v (640x360) [10.9 MB] || SDO_Data_Path_ipodsm.m4v (320x180) [4.2 MB] || SDO_Data_Path_WMVHQ_346x260_16_9.wmv (346x260) [11.1 MB] || SDO_Data_Path_SVS.mpg (512x288) [8.0 MB] ||

SDO is designed to help us understand the Sun's influence on Earth and Near-Earth space by studying the solar atmosphere on small scales of space and time and in many wavelengths simultaneously. ||

Animation of the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in it's deployed location. || 'Beauty Pass' of Solar Dynamics Observatory on-station. || SDO_pre.00002_print.jpg (1024x691) [86.7 KB] || SDO_thm.png (80x40) [16.5 KB] || SDO_pre.jpg (320x197) [8.3 KB] || SDOSml_pre.jpg (320x219) [9.6 KB] || SDOSml_pre_searchweb.jpg (320x180) [73.5 KB] || SDO.webmhd.webm (960x540) [6.7 MB] || SDO.mpg (720x486) [4.3 MB] || SDOSml.mpg (320x240) [4.3 MB] ||

Flares happen when the powerful magnetic fields in and around the sun reconnect. They're usually associated with active regions, often seen as sun spots, where the magnetic fields are strongest. Flares are classified according to their strength. The smallest ones are B-class, followed by C, M and X, the largest. Similar to the Richter scale for earthquakes, each letter represents a ten-fold increase in energy output. So an X is 10 times an M and 100 times a C. Within each letter class, there is a finer scale from 1 to 9. C-class flares are too weak to noticeably affect Earth. M-class flares can cause brief radio blackouts at the poles and minor radiation storms that might endanger astronauts. Although X is the last letter, there are flares more than 10 times the power of an X1, so X-class flares can go higher than 9. The most powerful flare on record was in 2003, during the last solar maximum. It was so powerful that it overloaded the sensors measuring it. They cut-out at X17, and the flare was later estimated to be about X45. A powerful X-class flare like that can create long lasting radiation storms, which can harm satellites and even give airline passengers, flying near the poles, small radiation doses. X flares also have the potential to create global transmission problems and world-wide blackouts. ||

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) is currently in the 'integration and test' phase of mission development, (i.e. observatory is now complete with the spacecraft bus, propulsion module and instruments), the ground system is being completed and flight software is being tested. Critical systems testing has already begun and environmental testing of he observatory will be conducted in the near future as they continue towards a launch readiness date of December 1, 2008. This series of short videos shows the SDO spacecraft being assembled and tested with narration by the engineers doing the work. It will be updated until SDO is ready for launch.For more information on SDO, visit the web site http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov ||