Motherboard

This NASA video offers a pretty awesome description of the SDO

Staring at the sun is not good for our eyes, even if it’s good for our understanding of the sun. Fortunately, NASA’s just sent up the Solar Dynamics Observatory, a 3,440 pound, nearly $1 billion machine that will capture images of our star at almost four times the resolution of an HD TV, transmitting the results back to Earth at 130 megabits per second. It’s the cornerstone of a new program the agency calls Living With A Star.

A NASA flack gave me the elevator pitch last weekend at Kennedy Space Center: “Basically, the SDO will photograph the sun in IMAX quality every ten seconds. It’s going to send us 1.5 terrabites of data per day.” NASA compares that to downloading 500,000 MP3s per day, seven days a week, from the sun. Sheesh. Hope the new budget can cover an iPod big enough for all that Sun Ra.

The video to that soundtrack will be the longest and best IMAX documentary of the Sun we’ve ever seen, courtesy of three instruments: the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, which uses four telescopes together to photograph the Sun’s surface and atmosphere using ten different wavelength filters; the HMI, which will look at the innards of the star and its magnetic fields; and EVE, which will measure extreme ultraviolet light activity.

All the sun porn in the universe—money shots of sunspots, solar flares, and coronal mass ejections—will help us not only to understand the dynamics of the sun’s heating of the Earth, but the origins of severe space weather, which can knock out power grids, communications systems and delicate satellites. After a long dry spell, the forecast for the next few years has solar activity on the rise, which could, for instance, disrupt GPS systems for periods of around ten minutes a few times a year. Maybe we should also learn what a map is again.

Before it got up there to start enhancing our understanding of the sun’s “climate,” the observatory had to cope with earth weather. Just two days after the (delayed) launch of the space shuttle, the SDO was slated to launch yesterday morning, but was pushed to this morning when the sensors on the Atlas V rocket detected high winds, with just 3 minutes and 59 seconds left in the countdown. Now the SDO is safely in orbit.