It was a cold day in Florida when SDO was launched on February 11, 2010. The Goddard Space Flight Center, along with much of the East Coast of the US, was snowed in with 4 ft of snow. The launch went beautifully and we started returning science data in April. To date, SDO has returned over 130 million images of the Sun. There are over 2000 papers discussing SDO in the NASA ADS abstract service, with 750 different people as first authors. We provide data to space weather forecasters and the public. It is nice to see SDO movies showing a prominence eruption on the nightly broadcast news, especially in the below-average level of activity we are seeing in Solar Cycle 24.
As we begin the fifth year of our prime mission we have updated our website. The main goal is to make it work more easily with mobile devices. The links should be the same, pointing you to the near-realtime SDO images. Try out the new website at
http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov. Tell us what you think at the
SDO Twitter feed.
Thanks for looking at SDO data and making us a great mission. Here's an AIA 193 image that seems to have the Sun smiling at us as we start our fifth year.
SDO is GO!
