Solar Dynamics Observatory: “Three Years of SDO Data–Narrated” 2013 NASA Goddard SFC
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“This version of Three Years of SDO Data is extended, and narrated by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center heliophysicist Alex Young. He highlights many interesting aspects of the video and points out several of the single-frame events that appear in it. In the three years since it first provided images of the sun in the spring of 2010, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has had virtually unbroken coverage of the sun’s rise toward solar maximum, the peak of solar activity in its regular 11-year cycle. This video shows those three years of the sun at a pace of two images per day.”
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
transcript
Public domain film from NASA.
The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) is a NASA mission which will observe the Sun for over five years. Launched on February 11, 2010, the observatory is part of the Living With a Star (LWS) program. The goal of the LWS program is to develop the scientific understanding necessary to effectively address those aspects of the connected Sun–Earth system directly affecting life and society. The goal of the SDO is to understand the influence of the Sun on the Earth and near-Earth space by studying the solar atmosphere on small scales of space and time and in many wavelengths simultaneously. SDO will investigate how the Sun’s magnetic field is generated and structured, how this stored magnetic energy is converted and released into the heliosphere and geospace in the form of solar wind, energetic particles, and variations in the solar irradiance…
General
The SDO spacecraft was assembled and tested at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and launched on February 11, 2010, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The primary mission is scheduled to last five years and three months, with expendables expected to last for ten years. Some consider SDO to be a follow-on mission to the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).
SDO is a 3-axis stabilized spacecraft, with two solar arrays, and two high-gain antennas. The spacecraft includes three instruments: the Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment (EVE) built in partnership with the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) built in partnership with Stanford University, and the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) built in partnership with the Lockheed Martin Solar & Astrophysics Laboratory. Data which is collected by the craft will be made available as soon as possible, after it is received…
Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI)…
Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment (EVE)…
Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA)…
Communications
SDO down-links science data (K-band) from its two onboard high-gain antennas, and telemetry (S-band) from its two onboard omnidirectional antennas. The ground station consists of two dedicated (redundant) 18-meter radio antennas in White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, constructed specifically for SDO. Mission controllers operate the spacecraft remotely from the Mission Operations Center at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The combined data rate is about 130 Mbit/s (150 Mbit/s with overhead, or 300 Msymbols/s with rate 1/2 convolutional encoding), and the craft generates approximately 1.5 terabytes of data per day (equivalent to downloading around 500,000 songs)…
NASA’s Launch Services Program at Kennedy Space Center managed the payload integration and launch. The SDO launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Space Launch Complex 41, utilizing an Atlas V-401 rocket with a RD-180 powered Common Core Booster, which has been developed to meet the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program requirements.
Orbit
After launch, the spacecraft was placed into an orbit around the Earth with an initial perigee of about 2,500 kilometres (1,600 mi). SDO then underwent a series of orbit-raising maneuvers which adjusted its orbit until the spacecraft reached its planned circular, geosynchronous orbit at an altitude of 36,000 kilometres (22,000 mi), at 102° W longitude, inclined at 28.5°…
SDO website
