SDO EVE Rocket arrives at White Sands

PI Tom Woods and crew arrived in White Sands Missile Range, NM to integrate the EVE calibration rocket on Monday and perform initial checkouts of the payload to make sure it survived. All is going well, and the launch has been moved up to May 3. Upcoming tasks next week are the environmental tests - vibe, spin balance, and bend test. Hopefully we can get ITAR and security approval for pictures quickly and post those here in the near future.

Keep up to date with the status at:

http://lasp.colorado.edu/rocket/rocket_future.html

SDO Day 55: Cruciforms and Raster Scans

Last evening the EVE cruciform was completed and the high-gain antenna raster resumed. A cruciform scan is a slow scan in a line through the Sun from East to West and another north to South, about 2.5 degrees in each direction. This is used to map out the field of view of the instrument. The high-gain antennas move quite a bit over a year and the raster scans are used to calibrate the pointing of the antennas.

Data continues to flow, SDO is GO!

SDO Day 54: A Day of Reflection

Sunday was a day to reflect on all of the data we have collected so far on the interaction of the instruments and the spacecraft. This week we begin a series of instrument calibration maneuvers and more testing of the high-gain antennas. First up is the EVE cruciform maneuver.

SDO is looking good!

SDO Day 52: Instrument Jitter and Guide Telescopes

Today the instruments examined how they affect the pointing of SDO. FIlters and shutters inside the instruments have to rotate into new positions before each exposure, so SDO has a lot things spinning around. Each instrument ran their filters wheels and shutters to see how SDO moved. After that they tested the guide telescopes that are part of AIA. The "Science Reference Boresight" is determined by these guide telescopes, so understanding their behavior is crucial to SDO.

SDO Day 51: High-gain Antennas and Jitter

SDO spent another day measuring the jitter of the spacecraft, this time how the motion of the two high-gain antennas affected the pointing of the instruments. The instrument teams helped with these tests while continuing to understand their own observing sequences.

SDO Day 50: The Wheels on the Spacecraft Bus Go Round and Round

Today SDO worked to understand how the reaction wheels that provide our fine pointing control interact with the spacecraft. SDO needs to point at the Sun very accurately while taking an image every 0.75 seconds (which means rotating shutters and filters), rotating the high-gain antennas to keep them pointed toward New Mexico, and rotate the entire observatory once per orbit to keep it pointed at the Sun. Understanding how the reaction wheels work is a essential step toward getting ready to send out the "firehose" of data SDO will generate.

SDO Day 49: The Future

The doors are open and the CCDs are cold, what's next? For the next several weeks SDO scientists and engineers will work to check out and calibrate the instruments and to coordinate the spacecraft and instruments. I may call it "Focus and Center" but it is a busy time for everyone on SDO making sure these complex instruments do what is needed to get our data. In mid-April we plan to show the world how great the instruments are working at a "First Light Media Telecon."

Stay tuned, Go SDO!