Wednesday, October 5, 2022
Fall 2022 Calibration Maneuvers Begin
Thursday, August 25, 2022
Comet Off-Point Test Today
This test assures that the SDO Team will be able to point SDO at an incoming comet with a 24-48 hour notice from the Sungrazer Comet Watchers.
Thursday, August 4, 2022
Major Outage -- The fiber optic link between White Sands Ground Station and the JSOC is down
Major Outage -- The fiber optic link between White Sands Ground Station and the JSOC in California is down. Repairs are underway.
Time Down: 08/03/2022 14:57 CT (08/03/2022 19:57 GMT)
Time Reported: 08/03/2022 15:10 CT (08/03/2022 20:10 GMT)
Reason for outage:
WSC/STA Links 1000/1001 down 03/1957:08Z. Carrier notified and they are experiencing an outage on an OC-192 between Sacramento and Burbank, Ca. The technicians in Sacramento have identified/found a bad timing and control module with no spares in inventory. They will ordered one from the vendor and expect it's arrival sometime today. (SR)
Outage Impact: SDO data
Thursday, July 28, 2022
SDO Timeline Through February 2023
- 2022/206 @ 0716 UTC (07/25 @ 03:16 am ET) - July-August 2022 Eclipse Season Starts
- 2022/208 @ 2240 UTC (07/27 @ 6:40 pm ET) - Station Keeping Manuever #25
- 2022/231 @ 0709 UTC (08/19 @ 3:09 am ET) - Eclipse Season Ends
- 2022/310 @ 2:00 am ET (11/06) - Daylight Savings Time Ends - GSFC Local Time now UTC -5:00
- 2022/341 @ TBD (12/07 @ TBD) - Momemtum Management Maneuver #45 (Tentative Date)
- 2023/020 @ 0722 UTC (01/20/2023 @ 2:22 am ET) - January-February 2023 Eclipse Season Starts
- 2023/021 @ 0440 UTC (01/20/2023 @ 11:40 am ET) - Handover Season Starts with First Handover
- 2023/032 @ TBD (02/01/2023 @ TBD) - Station Keeping Maneuver #26 (Tentative Date)
- 2023/044 @ 0722 UTC (02/13/2023 @ 2:22 am ET) - Eclipse Season Ends
Wednesday, July 27, 2022
Station Keeping maneuver #25 is Today
Tuesday, July 5, 2022
July 2022 Instrument Calibration Maneuvers
- 06 Jul 2022: EVE FOV and HMI/AIA Flatfield Calibrations (EVE FOV @ 1315 UTC (9:15-11:50 am ET); HMI/AIA Flatfield @ 1630-1910 UTC (12:30-3:10 pm ET))
- 20 Jul 2022: EVE Cruciform, 1400–1852 UTC (10:00 am - 2:52 pm ET)
Tuesday, June 28, 2022
JSOC Power has been Restored
Lunar Transit on June 29, 2022
Here's a movie of the transit from the SDO Flight Operations Team.
This transit occurs while SDO is in the midnight sector of its orbit. That means the motions of the Moon and SDO combine to make this a short transit, lasting about 35 minutes.
Enjoy!
Thursday, June 23, 2022
Momentum Management Maneuver (Delta-H) #44 Yesterday
Power Still Out at Stanford
Wednesday, June 22, 2022
Data Outage
Wednesday, May 11, 2022
HMI as a Hi-Speed Coronagraph (updated)
I also looked at the AIA 1600 Å passband and see a beautiful filament at 13:23:50 UTC. The filament is bright because it reflects light from the Sun towards SDO and emits its own light. Use Helioviewer to create your own movie of this passband to see the rest of the flare and filament liftoff.
Solar Cycle 25 is getting interesting!
A magnetic complex, destined to become Active Region 3006, was rotating into view on May 3, 2022, when it was the site of an X1.1 flare at 1309 UTC. Three hours later HMI observed a filament liftoff.
Junwei Zhao used all of the HMI frames to produce this movie of a filament liftoff and other evolution of the solar atmopshere above the nascent AR 3006.
This movie was made by using all of HMI’s 6 line-position intensities — not just the continuum images. Thus, this movie has an amazing 7.5-sec cadence, showing many more details than a 45-sec cadence movie. Because the data is from above the limb, Fe I 6173 is no longer an absorption line, we mostly see how it scatters light from the solar surface towards SDO. (The same is true when you look at filaments in Hα. The filaments are dark against the disk but are seen as bright prominences above the limb.) In this movie the on-disk signal is completely saturated so that the off-limb signal is more easily seen. This movie is also showing a reverse image of the off-limb pixels. The dark material would be bright in the original images. The images are 150" squares. The Sun is 1904" across on May 3, so the area seen in the movie is only 0.6% of the Sun's area.The movie clearly shows material being ejected from the Sun. Some material falls back towards the surface, but then stopped falling and was held there for a few minutes before the light faded away.
Another interesting thing is that a post-flare arcade formed right beside the limb. Although it is small and remains close to the limb, it was undoubtedly there for a few minutes.
This is the fourth off-limb flare captured by the HMI. The first three resulted in quite a few publications in studying the polarization of the off-limb flare loops, the emission mechanisms of the off-limb white flares, and studies coupling the white-light and UV/EUV/X-ray observations. This high-cadence movie shows that we still haven't figured out all of the ways SDO data can be used to study the Sun.
Thanks to Todd Hoeksema, Sushant Mahajan, and Junwei Zhao, all members of the HMI Team at Stanford, for discovering and providing the movies of this limb flare and filament liftoff.
I hope you enjoy this movie.
Thursday, April 7, 2022
April Calibration Maneuvers
- April 13, 2022: EVE Field of View (1415-1700 UTC, 10:15 am - 1:00 pm ET) and HMI/AIA Flatfield maneuvers (1730-2010 UTC, 1:30-4:10 pm ET)
- April 20, 2022: HMI Roll Maneuver (1400-2040 UTC, 10:00 am - 4:40 pm ET)
- April 27, 2022: EVE Cruciform (1300-1755 UTC, 9:00 am - 1:55 pm ET)
Wednesday, April 6, 2022
Momentum Management Maneuver (Delta-H) #43 Today
Thursday, March 31, 2022
An X1.3 Flare and a Cool View of Plasma Leaving the Sun
During the day we adjusted the fine guidance telescope, which causes the images to bounce a little bit. The flare starts at 17:26 UTC and ends at 17:46 UTC. What I found cool about this flare was the lass of plasma just south of the flare site. Here are two stills from the movie.
On the left the arrow points at some haze in the AIA 171 image. In the right image the arrow points at about the same place (there is a bright streak just to the right to get you oriented), but the image is less hazy where plasma has left the Sun.The material that left the Sun isn't all that close to the flare. But you can see in the movie that the haze goes away just after the flare. Look at the movie a few times and you will see the haze disappear.
There is also an excellent coronal cavity display at about 4 o'clock on the limb. These cavities are usually much slower in their evolution.
It is already a great Solar Cycle!
Wednesday, March 2, 2022
Computational Modeling for 3D Data Reconstruction of Solar Coronal Magnetic Fields
Thursday, February 17, 2022
SDO 12 Years on Orbit, Large Active Region Approaching?
The Flight Operations Team at Goddard Space Flight Center is another part of SDO’s success. The satellite and ground station are in great shape. FOT members help the science team by planning maneuvers to reduce the of time science data can’t be recorded. They have come to the MOC at odd hours to help resolve a problem and keep the data flowing.
But we shouldn’t forget the final team member, the Sun. And today we can see in the far-side images from February 13, 2022, that a large active region is sitting on the far side of the Sun. We should be seeing it rotate into view about 4 days from today (7 days from February 13). There are at least 4 numbered active regions on the Sun right now. How many will be there next week?
Here is a composite far-side image showing the magnetic field of the near-side (visble disk) of the Sun in greyscale and the time shifts of the far-side in color. A large active region (or sunspot) depresses the surface of the Sun and causes the wave to re-appear earlier than average. We can see a large region on the far-side with τ about -6 seconds.
Far-side images come from analyzing the helioseismic data of HMI and similar instruments. They are useful to watch for active regions developing on the far-side of the Sun where we have little or no other information. Twelve years of HMI data have improved the far-side images, now we will benefit from that work during Solar Cycle 25.
SDO is GO!
Friday, February 4, 2022
Snow Disrupts Data
Wednesday, February 2, 2022
SDO Station Keeping Maneuver #24 today
Thursday, January 20, 2022
The Winter 2022 EVE Cruciform is Complete
Over the next few days SDO will be supporting the validation of the PHI instrument on Solar Orbiter. PHI is similar to the HMI instrument on SDO. It uses the same spectral line of iron at 6173 Å to measure the line-of-sight Doppler velocity and the vector magnetic field on the solar surface. This weekend marks a time when the SO orbital position allows the scientists to do stereoscopic helioseismic observations, a first for us.
Next month, on 25 Feb 2022, SDO will support the 11th perihelion passage of the Parker Solar Probe.
Other dates of interest are: The Spring 2022 Eclipse Season starts 24 Jan 2022 and ends 17 Feb 2022. Stationkeeping Maneuver #24 is tentatively scheduled for 2326 UTC (6:26 pm ET), 02 Feb 2022.