For the past 4 years, the two STEREO spacecraft have been moving away from Earth and gaining a more complete picture of the sun. On Feb. 6, 2011, NASA will hold a press conference to reveal the first ever images of the entire sun and discuss the importance of seeing all of our dynamic star.
Let me bottom-line it for you: The Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) mission consists of two nearly identical spacecraft. One follows Earth around the sun; the other leads us. When those two craft are 180 degrees apart from each other, they will be able to see the ENTIRE sun simultaneously.
The time has almost come.
Below is a screen shot I took from the STEREO website. As you can see, Stereo A and Stereo B are almost 180 degrees from each other — on opposite sides of the sun — and 90 degrees from Earth. The orbits have been migrating gradually into this configuration for years, since the mission’s 2006 launch.
You’ll be hearing much more about this from NASA and gogblog as we approach February 9.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
Steele Hill, Goddard’s salesman of all things solar, just posted the latest weekly release of Sun imagery, courtesy of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Steele dubs it “The South Rises Again”
SDO watched as an active region in the Sun’s southern hemisphere produced a whole series of looping arcs of plasma in profile (Sept. 11-13, 2010). The arcs are actually charged particles spiraling along magnetic field lines. The images were taken in extreme ultraviolet light and reveal the dynamic activity visible above active regions. The material seen here is ionized iron heated to about one million degrees. We have seen very little activity in this hemisphere as opposed to the northern one, hence the tongue in cheek title.
This image is a feast, but it’s true beauty shines through when you play the video. It’s a whopper of a file, so make sure you’ve got a fast Internet connection and give it a few seconds to download.
click to zoom in on the action
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION?All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
Here’s the latest Picture of the Week from the Solar Dynamics Observatory, courtesy of Goddard’s solar media specialist Steele Hill.
The image depicts a large-scale feature called a coronal hole. It was created from observations in the extreme ultraviolet that SDO captured August 23-25. The “hole” is an area that colder, darker, and less dense than surrounding parts of the sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere. Here, the contours of the sun’s magnetic field allow hot star stuff — the solar wind — to stream out at high speed.
Thanks to Steele’s diligent work, these Picture of the Week features — there is also one for the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) — stream out to hundreds of science and nature centers all over the country.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION?All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
Here’s a dramatic short video from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) “Pick of the Week” website. The images were actually captured by one of the twin STEREO spacecraft.
click me to watch the video!
Here’s the detailed explanation from the Pick of the Week site:
As the STEREO (Behind) spacecraft observed in extreme UV light, the sun popped off no fewer than six eruptions over just two days (Aug. 14-15, 2010). At one point, three were occurring events at the same time. Most these were eruptive prominences in which cooler clouds of gases above the surface break away from the sun. The most powerful of these events, a coronal mass ejection, began around 6:30 UT on Aug. 15. It was harder to see from this spacecraft’s angle since it blasted out from the whiter active region in the lower center, so it had the sun as its backdrop.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION?All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
Some images are so extraordinary you don’t have to say all that much. And you don’t even need color.
So, briefly, here is an image snapped by the MESSENGER spacecraft, now exploring Mercury. The big blob is us, the littler blob is our moon. MESSENGER snapped the image May 6, 2010, from 114 million miles away — greater than Earth’s average distance from the sun.
And that’s all I gotta say about that. Read more about it at OnOrbit.
Earth and its moon
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION?All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.
Be afraid, be very afraid! This star eats satellites for breakfast, and wants to take away your Internet service.
I recently went to a talk by Goddard sun scientist Dean Pesnell about the Solar Dynamics Observatory. Pesnell is the project scientist for SDO, which launched February 11.
(Did you catch him being interviewed on CNN last week, June 7? Gogblog tips his solar dynamical hat to the SDO Tweeps out there who sent minute-by-minute updates of Pesnell’s on-camera adventures.)
Pesnell and others emphasize how important it is to have observatories like SDO to watch the closest star to Earth. Stormy space weather — basically, explosions of stuff from the sun’s surface — can interfere with or even damage satellites.
And in a case of life conveniently imitating PR, on April 5 the Galaxy 15 communication satellite stopped responding to commands, possibly because of a solar storm. The craft, which routes television traffic, was set adrift toward the telecommunication turf of another satellite, AMC-11.
Galaxy 15 was mindlessly broadcasting signals that could have interfered with other satellites. AMC-11′s operator, SES, worked to maneuver its bird to prevent interference. As of last week, Space Newswas reporting that no interference occurred.
It’s hard to be absolutely certain that our sun took out Galaxy 15, but the circumstances are pretty incriminating. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration reported a strong geomagnetic storm April 5 – the strongest of the year to that date. “A sharp gust of solar wind hit Earth’s magnetosphere today, April 5th, at approximately 0800 UT and sparked the strongest geomagnetic storm of the year.”
*** 1:43 pm. This just in from our art-imitating-life department: Check out this Brewster Rockit comic, which has ripped the Galaxy 15 story from the headlines and put a cute new spin on it. Thanks to Michelle Thaller, Goddard’s official Mistress of Science Communications, for the tip…
High-energy electric pulses from the sun could surge to Earth and cripple our electrical grid for years, causing billions in damages, government officials and scientists worry.
The House is so concerned that the Energy and Commerce committee voted unanimously 47 to 0 to approve a bill allocating $100 million to protect the energy grid from this rare but potentially devastating occurrence.
The Grid Reliability and Infrastructure Defense Act, or H.R. 5026, aims “to amend the Federal Power Act to protect the bulk-power system and electric infrastructure critical to the defense of the United States against cybersecurity and other threats and vulnerabilities.”
Among other scary things, the report says that the impact of a major solar storm could cause $1 to $2 trillion in damage and take us a decade to recover from. Imagine entire cities without power, water, transportation, and (shudder) Internet service for extended periods.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION?All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center.
not your mom's big old fat boring orange sun ball, is it?
So I went to this talk the other day about Twitter and spreading the gospel of the Solar Dynamics Observatory to the world. The talk came courtesy of a member of Goddard’s public outreach army, Aleya Van Doren. She works in what we NASA nerds call “formal education.” That just means she gets NASA science out into schools.
At the talk, Van Doren explained how she and other people here at Goddard used Twitter to build an enormous and active virtual community around the February 10 launch of our Solar Dynamics Observatory and the April 21 release of the first SDO images. Through the use of Twitter, they reached more than 5,000 students, 50 teachers, and thousands of people globally.
One key take-home message for me: Twitter drew people into the event who otherwise wouldn’t have known or even cared about SDO. I know this because one of them tweeted Van Doren and said it.
The SDO first light images blew everyone away. They revealed in glorious detail and color the boiling, bubbling, burning, bodacious ball of inconceivably hot plasma that is our home star. Game-changing space observatories are what NASA excels at. Think of SDO as the Hubble Space Telescope for the sun.
It’s not hard to sell this stuff to the public. The images are beautiful. They reach you at a gut emotional level, trigger that throaty Keanu Reeves “whoa…..” you hear when people see the latest Hubble beauty shot.
That’s some powerful mojo, brothers and sisters. Like so many of my colleagues in the science communication racket, gogblog lustily desires to reach audiences more diverse than the “science fans” we serve so well.
I love that they love us, really I do. But it’s preaching to the choir. How do we get people who don’t go to church to jump in and sing with us?
Twitter can help. Here’s how.
The tagline for the launch event was #SDOisGO. Twitter aficionados of course know that #SDOisGO is a hashtag, which you include in a tweet to attach it to an ongoing discussion.
#SDOisGO was the focus of a national Tweetup for the SDO launch. 50 tweeps were invited to Goddard to watch the event remotely; alas Snowpocalypse 2010 smothered that plan.
But 15 invited “Twitter Correspondents” made it to Kennedy Space Center for the launch. Other groups of tweeters staged 30 events elsewhere in the country.
The twitter army deployed on February 11, launch day. On the ground at Kennedy, thumbs were twitching and tweeps were tweeting.
When SDO released its first light images April 21, 15 Twitter Correspondents articulated their thumbs to a frenzy of clicking at the NASA press conference in Washington, D.C. By then the #SDOisGO community was well established.
not ANOTHER spectacular new sun image! I can't take it!
Some 5,000 students participated in classroom activities associated with the first light image release. In the day following the press conference, the size of the community swelled to 750,000 unique twitter users — enough to win “solar dynamics observatory” a place in the twittersphere as a trending topic.
No small feat for a science topic competing for attention with celebutantes and Justin Bieber.
Gogblog is jealous. So very very jealous.
The other big thing I took from the #SDOisGO experience is that twitter and other social media are not simply some alternative broadcast system to launch content at people. In fact, if you launch but never engage, people ignore you on twitter and won’t follow you.
People tweet because they like to meet people and have a communal experience. I guess it’s just what our little primate brains evolved to do.
So people like to meet other people, make new pals, and talk. And they are happy to talk about SDO, or other interesting things. As long as you engage them on a human level.
Me gogblog, you friend?
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ OH AND DID I MENTION?All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center.
One key take-home message for me: Twitter drew people into the event who otherwise wouldn’t have known or even cared about SDO. I know this because one of them tweeted Van Doren and said it.
