SDO, (Solar Dynamics Observatory) Options

[Guest_PhilCo126_*]

So it's fingers crossed for the Solar Dynamics Observatory, destined to help the predictions of "space weather".
SDO promises to become an exciting mission as an orbiting solar observatory with multiple high-definition telescopes has never been attempted before…

The prelaunch readiness press conference will be held at 1 p.m. EST, on Monday, 8th February 2010 from the Kennedy Space Center News Center. It will be immediately followed by the SDO science briefing, both briefings will be
broadcast live on NASA Television. Launch is set for 9th February 2010 (10:30 – 11:30 a.m. EST).

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

Unfortunately we wont have realtime images like we have with SOHO

[djellison]

At 130Mbps - we'd struggle to keep up, and to establish and maintain an internet server platform to host that content would be an epic, and expensive challenge.

[helvick]

That's a couple of Petabyte's per annum once you factor in the need to keep the raw data and have the space for a couple of derived products for each image. Even if they decide to release jpg's in a manner similar to the MER releases we won't be having a Midnight Sol Browser downloading all of those to our PC's anytime soon.

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

One per hour would be ok

[Ron Hobbs]

nprev,

I think you are going to love SDO as well. I watched the pre-launch science briefing this morning, and it is a damn powerful observatory. And of course we will still be getting data from STEREO.

I think we are going to learn a lot about our nearest star.

Ron

[Explorer1]

So when does the mission officially begin? They've launched successfully, and have to maneuver into a better orbit, but how long until the firehose opens up? I hope they follow the HiRise team's lead....

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

April I think

[Ron Hobbs]

Hmmm. The SDO Mission website is down. I hope that is not a bad sign. They will probably get it back online after the holiday here.

Pertinent to this thread, one of the people on the Scientific Briefing last week commented that they were hoping to get SDO in orbit at solar minimum so they could follow an entire solar cycle. They were quite delighted that the Sun had "cooperated" by delaying its exit from minimum.

BTW, the briefing materials are here. There are some pretty cool graphics there.

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

Hmmm. The SDO Mission website is down. I hope that is not a bad sign.

It's been off for a few days now.

[Explorer1]

"It will take about 3 weeks to circularize SDO's orbit and another month to test the spacecraft and check out the science instruments. We will see first light in about 60 days"

From a new blog post on TPS. Doing well so far....

[Ron Hobbs]

The Planetary Society blog was written by fellow Solar System Ambassador Ken Kremer and is certainly worth a read.

SDO is being described as "the crown jewel" of Solar observatory missions. As part of their outreach, National Air and Space Museum (and another museum whose name I don't remember) will have big flat screens showing the near real time images of the Sun. (1.5 terabytes/day will be coming down to the ground.)

You know, I think we are going to need an SDO thread.

[Guest_PhilCo126_*]

SDO website s back online with news that on February 17, 2010 the observatory completed the first of 9 main engine burns that will raise the spacecraft from 2500 Km into its final geosynchronous orbit at 36000 Km...

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

SDO is on Station

Tue, 16 Mar

The third Trim Motor Firing (TMF #3) was successfully completed Tuesday evening. This apogee burn raised our perigee to geosynchronous with an orbital period of one day.

SDO is on station, next is to start up the instruments!

[kwan3217]

For part the way up, one channel of the EVE instrument was on. All the doors and filters were closed, though which means that its measurement was uncorrupted by light.

Every time the spacecraft went through perigee, the signal on that channel spiked by a factor of 10. The first perigee was less than 1 hour after we turned the EVE electronics on. It was kind of scary watching it the first time, wondering if it would ever turn around. We recognized almost immediately that we were seeing the protons of the inner Van Allen belt. Our instrument is relatively well shielded against the electrons of the outer belt, but we could (just barely) see that belt also.

Now EVE is an ultraviolet instrument, not a radiation instrument, and is not calibrated to do an actual radiation measurement. We can't say that a particular measurement represents so many particle hits per second, particle energy, particle type, or really anything other than we got higher counts here than there. But it does make an interesting map.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA4Y4kSzGNE

[stevesliva]

Neat! Someone help me on the music... something by Bizet?

[kwan3217]

Beethoven's Ninth, second movement (Molto Vivace)

[Byran]

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010IAUS..264..434S

STRESS - STEREO TRansiting Exoplanet and Stellar Survey
The Heliospheric Imager (HI) instruments on board the two STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) spacecraft provides an excellent opportunity for space based stellar photometry. The HI instruments provide a wide area coverage (20° × 20° for the two HI-1 instruments and 70° × 70° for the two HI-2 instruments) and long continuous periods of observations (20 days and 70 days respectively). Using HI-1A which has a pass band of 6500Å to 7500Å and a cadence of 40 minutes, we have gathered photometric information for more than a million stars brighter than 12th magnitude for a period of two years. Here we present some early results from this study on a range of variable stars and the future prospects for the data.

Plan to use images of the solar observatory SDO (Solar Dynamics Observatory) too to search for transit exoplanets?

[djellison]

SDO isn't taking the same sort of imagery as the instruments mentioned in that article.

[Explorer1]

http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/mission/project/leostatus.php

They've reached science orbit and are testing instruments now. Encouraging to see that they're posting on weekends...

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

First light is expected very soon

[stevesliva]

HMI door open. Sweet.

[kwan3217]

EVE instrument: All four doors open, all channels are functioning properly

[djellison]

Heard at the UK Space Conference, a STEREO scientists wouldn't comment directly about SDO when asked if he had seen pictures yet - but he said "I'm smiling"

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

I think they are opening the doors to the AIA instrument today.

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

All 4 doors on the AIA instrument successfully opened a few hours ago.

[kwan3217]

First Light press conference tentatively scheduled for 21 April 2010

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

First Light press conference tentatively scheduled for 21 April 2010

Confirmed now.

[Stu]

From SDO's Twitter updates:

"First Light press conference scheduled for April 21st! Calibration tests so far are amazing. Updates here: http://ow.ly/1uKgs "

Not building these images up at all, are they?

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

Massive solar prominence

http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov//data/REPRO...eit304_1024.jpg

PLEASE PLEASE let SDO have captured that !!!!!!!

LASCO C2

http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov//data/REPRO...331_c2_1024.jpg

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

Visible in the C3 images now

http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov//data/REPRO...342_c3_1024.jpg

Unfortunatey, it looks like SOHO missed most of the event.

[elakdawalla]

I wasn't sure what I was going to write about today; that'll do nicely! Thanks for keeping an eye on the Sun for the rest of us, Sunspot! I would love to see SDO images of this; I don't yet have a good sense for what SDO will be showing us.

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

Im soooo hoping SDO caught this... can you imagine it not in a 1024x1024 pixel image like SOHO but one at 4096x4096 and images every 10 seconds

Made a animated GIF from the C2 images

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

And from C3

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[kwan3217]

SDO started a calibration maneuver at 8:00UTC during this event, in which it turned away from the Sun. During the maneuver it would have briefly glanced at the Sun again. This was after the EIT image mentioned above, but before the coronagraph images. I can't say anything about whether AIA was taking pictures before 8:00, just what the spacecraft as a whole was doing. If they were taking pictures before this maneuver or during the part where the spacecraft glanced back, they should have something (additional) awesome to show at the first light press conference.

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

SDO started a calibration maneuver at 8:00UTC during this event, in which it turned away from the Sun.

ohh never mind.

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[djellison]

It's not like this is the last flare expected to occur during SDO's lifetime. There will be dozens, hundreds, thousands over the next decade.

[NickF]

Direct link for the LASCO C2 movie of the recent mass ejection

http://soho.esac.esa.int/data/LATEST/current_c2.mpg

(interesting to see something apparently flying splat into the Sun on 10 Apr - I assume this has been discussed elsewhere)

[stevesliva]

http://soho.esac.esa.int/data/LATEST/current_c2.mpg

Word is the SDO press conference on the 21st will have video of at least one prominence, but it's not necessarily either seen here. As Doug said, there will be lots to see over the years.

[centsworth_II]

(interesting to see something apparently flying splat into the Sun on 10 Apr - I assume this has been discussed elsewhere)

Comet Eaten By the Sun As Spacecraft Watches

Not so rare an event it seems. From 2006: Comet Plunges into the Sun

[nprev]

No, not at all. IIRC, SOHO's picked up more than 1700 Sun-grazing comets, many of which actually impacted the Sun.

Relatively bright ones like this are uncommon, though, and definitely very cool!

[Stu]

All this activity is really making me want to buy a solar telescope... Had a look through a few, and seeing prominences in an eyepiece is absolutely amazing. I think that once SDO starts releasing images, and video, of the Sun "in action" demand for solar telescopes is going to go through the roof...

I feel some overtime coming on...

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

It's not like this is the last flare expected to occur during SDO's lifetime. There will be dozens, hundreds, thousands over the next decade.

Yes, but the Sun has been blank and lifeless for about 700 days over the last few years, this is like Christmas coming.

[Ant103]

Some pics taken by french amateur here
http://www.astrosurf.com/ubb/Forum3/HTML/025003.html
http://www.astrosurf.com/ubb/Forum3/HTML/025001.html
http://www.astrosurf.com/ubb/Forum3/HTML/024994.html
http://www.astrosurf.com/ubb/Forum3/HTML/024998.html
http://www.astrosurf.com/ubb/Forum3/HTML/024995.html

Pretty amazing

[ElkGroveDan]

Some pics taken by french amateur here

Vache sacrée!

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

Here's the eruption taken from the full size 1024x1024 C2 images

LASCO C2 Eruption - 13th April 2010

It covers the time frame 09.54 - 16.06 UT

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

Great view from STEREO Ahead !!!!!!!

http://stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov/browse//...5_n4euA_304.jpg

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

18 hours from STEREO AHEAD

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4011/452485...1d6ff507b_o.gif

Same from STEREO Behind

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4005/452485...96ae77aec_o.gif

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

And a half size, full frame animation - 4.5MB

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4027/452552...3ea71a6e3_o.gif

[pjam]

Thanks for posting these views..! Looking forward to lots more from SDO!
Cheers,
-pjam

[Tman]

Have you taken a seat already? http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/

[stevesliva]

An extra link from a friend:

http://aia.lmsal.com/public/firstlight.html
http://aia.lmsal.com/public/firstlight/

I have reason to believe there will be some incredible videos posted there.

[Stu]

The SDO Outreach team really seem to have a handle on it, don't they? I think this will be a brilliant and very rewarding mission to follow - and that sales of solar viewing telescopes will rocket after tonight.

[djellison]

Or people might go ( like I did a while ago ) "Meh - not much point looking through a telescope with pics like this available"

[Stu]

Yeah, but then they actually *look* through a telescope, and see the prominences leaping off the Sun with their own eyes, and the Sun becomes... alive... I'm hoping to get a solar telescope set up at our solar system scale model in August - and planning on some big summer overtime to afford to buy a Coronado for myself, too :-)

[Ron Hobbs]

Have you taken a seat already?

I am in the front row.

[ugordan]

Presser now starting on NASA TV.

[tedstryk]

Or people might go ( like I did a while ago ) "Meh - not much point looking through a telescope with pics like this available"

Either way, it should definitely help the hard drive industry.

[djellison]

Umm.

WOW

[Ron Hobbs]

As "Lika" said, "... struck with awe."

[stevesliva]

An extra link from a friend:
http://aia.lmsal.com/public/firstlight.html

I haven't gotten the movs to download, but the stills are nice. Like this one:
http://aia.lmsal.com/public/firstlight/201...44515/f0171.gif

[Hungry4info]

I only attempted to download one, but didn't have a problem.

If it weren't 40 Mb I would e-mail it to you.

[Ron Hobbs]

I was poking around the SDO First Light web page and I found this site. Has the movies in numerous formats and sizes.

Scientific Visualization Studio

I think I will spending some time there.

[stevesliva]

Edited my previous links to the actual HTML page rather than a directory listing:
http://aia.lmsal.com/public/firstlight.html

[deglr6328]

OHH EM EFF GEE......

*dies*



......no words.

Mindblowing.

[nprev]

SDO might just be the mission that finally converts Mrs. nprev into an UMSF fan...just caught her independently surfing to this site on her MacBook!

Just stunning.

[Explorer1]

Like MRO/LRO all over again!

Quite a trio we've got going on eh?

[Stu]

SDO might just be the mission that finally converts Mrs. nprev into an UMSF fan...just caught her independently surfing to this site on her MacBook!

That's it, she's come over to the Dark Side now...

You'll have to behave now, Nick!

[nprev]

No worries. She married a sleazy cigar-smoking robot, she knows the score.

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

I wonder why they didnt go with the same colour scheme for the 304 (orange) ,171 (Blue) and 193 (Green) lines like those from SOHO and STEREO.

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

Here's the SOHO EIT 171 image taken at about the same time as the SDO 171 IMAGE, the difference is staggering.

SOHO 171

SDO 171

The SDO image is a 10MB GIF, couldn't find it in JPG format.



And again with the EIT 304 image

SOHO EIT 304

SDO 304

Again the SDO image is a 10MB GIF

[kwan3217]

On the press conference and EVE instrument:

The solar image on the EVE spectrum image is not a mistake. We designed the instrument almost from the beginning to use an otherwise unused portion of one of the spectrometer CCDs as a pinhole camera - we call it SAM, the Solar Aspect Monitor. SAM has its own hardware including a precision 26 micron pinhole, filter wheel, and its own optical path with a door (one of four on the instrument) that we had to open to get first light.

The unexpected thing about it is that we are able to see the sun as well as we do. The SAM image was apparent in the very first CCD image we got down. We weren't expecting to be able to see the limb or active regions this well until years from now, well up into solar max.

-- A concerned EVE data processing engineer

[Stu]

V cool...

"SDO shows Earth eclipsing Sun":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjlFL-3rLLE

[Explorer1]

Those comparison images really drive home the difference in resolving power.
The comparison between MRO taking on MGS's role is more and more apt!

[elakdawalla]

The solar image on the EVE spectrum image is not a mistake.

What exactly was said about that? It surprised me when I heard it but I was busy writing down other things so I didn't get what the P.I. said. It seemed weird to me that an image of the Sun showing up so beautifully on a detector would be a "mistake."

[Stu]

Come on, you knew it was coming...

http://astropoetry.wordpress.com/2010/04/2...-opens-its-eyes

[kwan3217]

What exactly was said about that? It surprised me when I heard it but I was busy writing down other things so I didn't get what the P.I. said. It seemed weird to me that an image of the Sun showing up so beautifully on a detector would be a "mistake."

From the report on Spaceflightnow.com: http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n1004/21sdoimages/

"Our first image from EVE doesn't look anything like it should," Pesnell said.

I may have misinterpreted this, but I remember thinking at the time that it sounded like he said this was a mistake.

[Hungry4info]

Yeah, the way it was worded made me think it was a problem too.

[stevesliva]

I may have misinterpreted this, but I remember thinking at the time that it sounded like he said this was a mistake.

But, is it? Is there worry that at solar max the pinhole image will obscure the spectrum? (Or some such thing?)

It's "unexpected," but is it okay?

[kwan3217]

But, is it? Is there worry that at solar max the pinhole image will obscure the spectrum? (Or some such thing?)

It's "unexpected," but is it okay?

We don't expect the SAM image to cause a problem, even at solar max. There is plenty of space on the CCD between the solar image and the spectrum. If it does somehow cause a problem, we can turn the SAM filter wheel to 'dark' and effectively turn SAM off. SAM is a lower priority measurement -- EVE is primarily a spectrometer, and there are five other cameras on SDO, all higher-resolution than SAM.

SAM isn't even really an imager - we plan on using it to get a spectrum as well. The main EVE measurement is a spectrum from about 7nm, right on the edge between ultraviolet and x-rays, out to about 120nm, at the Lyman Alpha line. We use SAM to fill in the spectrum from 7nm down to almost zero, in the soft x-ray band.

It's really hard to build a diffraction grating that works for x-rays. The smaller the wavelength is, the smaller the lines on the grating have to be. It's hard enough to get a grating that works well in extreme ultraviolet. Also, x-rays being x-rays, they have a tendency to pass through the grating rather than be diffracted by it.

So, SAM doesn't use a grating at all. We collect the image of the sun, and then analyze that image pixel-by-pixel. SAM is designed with a small-enough pinhole and short-enough exposure that we expect only one x-ray photon to hit any one pixel. When a pixel does get hit, its brightness is directly proportional to the energy of the photon that hit it. Then we can use Planck's constant to get the wavelength of each photon, then count and bin the photons to get a spectrum.

It's a really neat concept, and one that hasn't to my knowledge been tried in space. The theory is good, but in theory, theory and practice are identical, while in practice, they are not. We are treating it as an engineering experiment. We have a long way to go before we see this work, but initial signs are good.

[dilo]

Perhaps I missed the information within thread... do we have any indication of public, regular, real-time images release in the next future???

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

SDO Day 76: Getting Ready for Science Data

Mon, 26 Apr

SDO is moving toward becoming an operational science mission. The data will be available from several sites in a variety of formats. SDO scientists and engineers are working to set up those access points, but we won't be ready for regular data releases until mid-May.

Next step is the EVE calibration rocket, scheduled to fly on May 3, 2010 from the White Sands Missile Range.

[stevesliva]

More prominence vids:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/scien...r10_plasmarain/

[jrdahlman]

Now that we have "real-time" images of the sun, I've been wondering about the issue of light-time delay:

In these images, do the scientists need to take into account the light-time travel distance between different parts of the sun?

For most planets, even Jupiter, it doesn't make much of a difference. But the sun is several light-seconds wide. (Ah, "about 4.643" in diameter from a quick Wikipedia lookup.) The sun is a globe, so if dead center of the image is "now", the edge of the images would presumably show events that happened a few seconds "before" the center's events--in other words, no picture of the sun shows it all "at the same time"!

Would this effect distort the shape of prominences? (I mean really big ones.) Should we "correct" images for it? (Leave the center alone, but shove the part at the edge back closer to the sun so "the is the shape it really was at that moment"?)

Maybe we should mentally overlay an archers-target of concentric rings over sun images: label bulls-eye as "now", the next ring as "x sec. ago", etc.

Can we fix this? Merge pictures taken a few seconds apart: keep the center and merge the outer part from a few seconds before it... Oh darn. It only takes pictures every 10 seconds. Missed the window! But you know what I'm going for.

What is the way solar scientists handle this issue?

[Hungry4info]

I would imagine that since not a lot of things occur in a 4-second duration on the sun, compared to what all is being observed, it's forgivable.

But I'm not a solar physicist so that's just my uneducated guess.

[nprev]

The scale of observations should be considered. Phenomena of interest such as prominences, etc. are fairly localized, so the speed of light isn't really much of a factor. In any case, events that might effect the entire Sun (i.e., long-period 'seismic' oscillations) obviously propagate at far less than the speed of light, so again SOL lag isn't really a consideration for observation or interpretation.

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

There are smaller version available on youtube if you don't fancy the 25MB version http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C9L90uAOXs

[Guest_Oersted_*]

ouch, a hair on the lens?!

Spectacular images! - I really look forward to a hi-def 1080p hour-long movie for my flat-screen tv!

[S_Walker]

ouch, a hair on the lens?

Looks like it's directly on the detector, or it was a CR hit on the flat field calibration frame.

[Adam Hurcewicz]

Take a look to most recent images from:
http://sdowww.lmsal.com/suntoday


http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/SunInTime...ecent/l0131.jpg
http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/SunInTime...ecent/l0171.jpg
http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/SunInTime...ecent/l0193.jpg
http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/SunInTime...ecent/l0211.jpg
http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/SunInTime...ecent/l0094.jpg
http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/SunInTime...ecent/l0335.jpg
http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/SunInTime...ecent/l1600.jpg
http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/SunInTime...ecent/l1700.jpg
http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/SunInTime...ecent/l4500.jpg
http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/SunInTime...ecent/l0304.jpg

http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/SunInTime...304_211_171.jpg
http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/SunInTime...094_335_193.jpg
http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/SunInTime...211_193_171.jpg

Change letter "l" to "f" or "t" is:
l - 1024x1024 px
f - 4096x4096 px
t - 512x512 px

More info:
http://sdowww.lmsal.com/js/whats_this.html

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

cool

[Stu]

Oh man, like my hard drive wasn't groaning already...

[Stu]

VERY chuffed - and honoured - to have my "First Light" poem featured on the SDO Website...

http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/mission/project/leostatus.php

[Tesheiner]

Well done, Stu!

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/

The SDO site now has access to images, although its listed as "the sun now" they are about 36 hours old.

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

Some fantastic magnetic loops visible in the "193" images today

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

The SDO images have been looking a little odd lately, not sure if its a processing issue before they go onto the web or what. Looking badly overexposed.

[Juramike]

Maybe the sun is too bright?
<ducks>

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

Stunning prominence visible to SDO right now

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[Stu]

Gorgeous pic, thanks!

I was really tthinking about buying a solar telescope, but can't help wondering "What's the point, when I can enjoy the view via SDO?" But I'm one of those people who actually finds more enjoyment and satisfaction in seeing Jupiter's belts and moons for real, through my own 4.5" reflector, than I do from looking at a Hubble portrait, so I'll probably still get one... some day...