Solar Dynamics Observatory Set For Shipment
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By Jefferson Morris
GREENBELT, Md. - NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) soon will leave its home at Goddard Space Flight Center here and travel by truck to Cape Canaveral, Fla., where it is due to be orbited by an Atlas V rocket in November.
The first mission in NASA's Living With A Star program, SDO will study the solar atmosphere from geosynchronous Earth orbit, taking images of the sun in multiple wavelengths at a resolution 10 times higher than high-definition TV.
The spacecraft was designed and built by a team of 250 people at Goddard, and will be run from a dedicated Mission Operations Center here. It is scheduled to ship out July 7.
SDO has three primary instruments: the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, built by Lockheed Martin's Solar & Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, Calif.; the Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment, built by the University of Colorado; and the Helioseismic & Magnetic Imager (HMI), built by Stanford University and Lockheed Martin.
SDO should provide insight into the causes of the solar cycle, which runs an average of 11 years. The sun is now in the midst of an unusually long solar minimum, with weeks between observed sunspots, according to SDO Project Scientist William Dean Pesnell.
HMI will allow scientists to see "basically, a sonogram of the sun," Pesnell said during a media day here earlier this week. "By using the sound waves from the sun, we can understand the clock in the sun. We think we're starting to understand ... how the sun figures out when it's time to start a solar cycle."
For the full version of this story, see Aerospace Daily & Defense Report.
Photo of SDO in the Space Environment Simulator: Goddard Space Flight Center
