At a press conference today in Washington DC, researchers unveiled “First Light” images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, a space telescope designed to study the sun.
“SDO is working beautifully,” reports project scientist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “This is even better than we could have dreamed.”
Launched on February 11th from Cape Canaveral, the observatory has spent the past two months moving into a geosynchronous orbit and activating its instruments. As soon as SDO’s telescope doors opened, the spacecraft began beaming back scenes so beautiful and puzzlingly complex that even seasoned observers were stunned.
For instance, here is one of the first things SDO saw:
Top: An erupting prominence observed by SDO on March 30, 2010. The 29 MB movie takes a while to download, but it is worth the wait. A high-res still frame is also available.
Credit: SDO/AIA
“We’ve seen solar prominences before—but never quite like this,” says Alan Title of Lockheed Martin, principal investigator of the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA), the observatory’s main telescope array. “Some of my colleagues say they’ve learned new things about prominences just by watching this one movie.”
SDO is the first mission of NASA’s Living with a Star (LWS) program. The goal of LWS is to understand the sun as a magnetic variable star and to measure its impact on life and society on Earth. Program scientist Lika Guhathakurta of NASA headquarters envisions big things for the new observatory:
“SDO is our ‘Hubble for the sun’,” she says. “It promises to transform solar physics in the same way the Hubble Space Telescope has transformed astronomy and cosmology.”
“No solar telescope has ever come close to the combined spatial, temporal and spectral resolution of SDO,” adds Title. “This is possible because of the combination of 4096 x 4096-pixel CCDs with huge dynamic range and a geosynchronous orbit which allows SDO to observe the sun and communicate with the ground around the clock.”
Top: A full-disk multiwavelength extreme ultraviolet image of the sun taken by SDO on March 30, 2010. False colors trace different gas temperatures. Reds are relatively cool (~60,000 K); blues and greens are hotter (> 1,000,000 K). [full-resolution image]
Credit: SDO/AIA
One of the most amazing things about the observatory is its “big picture” view. SDO is able to monitor not just one small patch of sun, but rather the whole thing–full disk, atmosphere, surface, and even interior. “We’re going to make connections that were impossible in the past,” says Title.
As an example he offers the events of April 8th:
With SDO looking on, decaying sunspot 1060 unleashed a minor “B3-class” solar flare. A shock wave issued from the blast site and raced across the surface of the sun (
