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[Voice off Screen] NASA is celebrating the tenth anniversary of the STEREO mission

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STEREO are twin satellites and they look at the sun

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and it's returned a lot of really important information about the sun and here to tell us

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more about this mission is Dr. Georgia del

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at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, thanks for joining us. [Georgia] Thanks for having me

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[Voice off Screen] So start by telling us, what is space weather and why does it matter

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to us on Earth? [Georgia] So that's a great question, we're very

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familiar with the weather we have on the Earth obviously and we do want to

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actually be able to predict it and watch the patterns and the same thing

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is true for space weather, space weather is largely produced by the Sun it

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has storms so it has solar flares and coronal mass ejections.

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and these reach the Earth and sometimes they can be manifested in really beautiful ways

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like the aurora we see in the northern and southern hemispheres

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but other times it's a little bit more of a concern. It can disrupt communications

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and navigation systems, it can bring down power systems

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and it causes radiation to our astronauts that are traveling

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so we really want to be able to have some predictive capabilities so that we can safeguard

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against space weather. [Voice off Screen] Now let's talk a little bit about STEREO

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how has it changed our understanding of the sun?

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[Georgia] So that's a great question, STEREO is two missions

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and it actually moves- one of the spacecraft moves

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STEREO-B moves ahead of the Earth and the other moves behind the Earth

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and as it progresses in it's trajectory we're able to see and map

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out the entire sun in 360 degrees for the first time.

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So this is really exciting because we can see an event on the backside of the sun

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and watch it as it progresses to the front side of the sun where we're used

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to looking at it and helping us to predict more weather- space weather. The other

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thing is that we have two spacecrafts so it's as if you have two eyes

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on the sun, and you can see the objects in three dimensions

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and that has been transformative in terms of how we've learned how the sun

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works. [Voice off Screen] Now we're gearing up for the solar event

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of the century in the U.S., the august 2017 solar eclipse

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How does an eclipse like this help us understand the sun?

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So I just want to start out by saying if you have an opportunity to

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see it, you should, it's a very breathtaking event.

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But you know, the other things is that it is going to be the path of

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totality will be going across the entire country from Oregon all the way to

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the Carolinas. So many people will have an opportunitty to see it.

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Scientifically speaking for us at NASA because the moon acts as

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an occulter, it blocks out the sun, almost all of the light

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So what you're left with is the corona, it's the atmosphere

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of the sun and we can really study what's going on in the atmosphere

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of the sun, we do have those kinds of instruments called "corona graphs"

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in space and on the ground that studies the sun, but the moon is just

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the right size so we can look very deep down in the atmosphere for the first time.

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the other thing is that we can test our instrumentation

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both the ground based instruments and those instruments that we'd like to fly on future missions

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So i really hope that all of us will try to get involved in this next

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2017 solar eclipse. [Voice off Screen] Speaking of future missions. NASA

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has an upcoming mission that will for the first time touch the sun which is

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just incredible, tell us more about this mission. [Georgia] So this is so

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solar pro plus, and it will be launched in 2018, and

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it's really exciting because right for the solar eclipse we were able to actually

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see the atmosphere. Now we're going to send a spacecraft right in

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to the atmosphere, we'll be four million miles right next to the surface

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of the sun. 25 times closer than we are to the Earth

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and we'll be able to see these eruptions right up close for the first time

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and that's really very exciting.So we'll be able to actually tell

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how these eruptions propagate from the Sun to the Earth

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and that again will help us to understand and have better predicative capabilities

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for space weather. [Voice off Screen] Now we heard that

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STEREO-B was giving NASA the silent treatment for a while. Can you

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tell us what happened? [Georgia] So STEREO-A and STEREO-B were

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progressing towards the backside of the sun, and we knew that it would be very

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difficult to communicate with it when it was behind the sun, so we were preparing these

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spacecraft for that maneuver and unfortunately during the preparation

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STEREO-B had an anomaly, it began to spin, and we lost

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the pointing of the antenna to the Earth so we communication.

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But what's remarkable is that 22 months later

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we actually heard something from STEREO-B, that was only a few months ago

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and we tried to stabilize the spacecraft but we weren't able to

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but we are still trying to recover STEREO-B, and it's important to know that

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STEREO-B had 8 years of great data, and

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STEREO-A is continuing to give us good coverage and in fact it's- we- between

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STEREO-A and spacecraft at Earth, we can see a great part of the sun

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[Voice off Screen] And where can we learn more

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about this mission and some of NASA's other heliophysics missions?

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So NASA has a lot of information on the website

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nasa.gov, and you can find out more about STEREO with

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backslash stereo @nasa.gov and i'm also going to recommend you

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go to our Twitter handle which is @NASASunEarth

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There's a lot of information that you can find out about all the missions we're doing at NASA

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[Voice off Screen] Great, thanks so much for joining us. [Georgia] Thanks for having me.