Station Keeping Maneuver and Cool Video

SDO performed a station keeping maneuver (SK #21), Wednesday at 2210 UT (6:10 pm ET). For about 15 minutes beofre and after the maneuver SDO science data may be blurry or missing.

Looking for a new way to enjoy SDO Data?

Grammy award-winning artist Beck took an ethereal journey to the stars for his 2019 record "Hyperspace." Now, he has taken this cosmic journey a giant leap forward in a collaboration with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and artificial intelligence creatives OSK. The result: A visual album experience titled "Hyperspace: A.I. Exploration."

The new visual album, unveiled today (Aug. 12), is an "interstellar journey combining publicly available NASA mission images, curated with assistance from NASA JPL, visualizations, animations and data with revolutionary Artificial Intelligence tech," with Hyperspace's songs as the soundtrack," according to a Beck statement.

NASA's visual archives were scoured by OSK using "unique A.I. utilizing computer vision, machine learning and Generative Adversarial neural Networks (GAN)" and it "began creating its own visions of our universe," Beck representatives wrote in the statement.

Hyperspace: A.I. Experience Tracklist

• Hyperlife | Landsat 8, International Space Station
• Uneventful Days | Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), Apollo 12
• Saw Lightning | Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), Curiosity Rover, Viking 1 Orbiter
• Die Waiting | Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)
• Chemical | Cassini-Huygens
• Hyperspace | Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)
• Stratosphere | Spitzer Space Telescope
• Dark Places | Hubble Space Telescope (HST)
• Star | Hubble Space Telescope (HST), Swift, Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope
• Everlasting Nothing | Hubble Space Telescope (HST)

The SDO video is here: https://youtu.be/iE7PBovWh-E

SDO Images in a Music Video, Anniversary of Toronto Space Weather Event

Movies of erupting CMEs from SDO/AIA were used in the new music video by the band Dispatch - "Circles Around the Sun"! You can see the video here, which was filmed mostly at the VLA and uses a lot of historic NASA footage and movies of the aurora filmed from the ISS. Dispatch - Circles Around the Sun

Also, today is the anniversary of a small space weather outage in Canada. On August 16, 1989 the Toronto stock exchange was disabled by a geomagnetic storm. This followed on the massive outage in March 1989 that interrupted electrical distribution throughout Quebec. This geomagnetic storm was caused by a coronal mass ejection from a very large X20 solar flare seen on August 16, 1989, which was even stronger than the X15 flare on March 6, 1989 that heralded the earlier storm.
Microchips failed in August 1989 rather than the electrical grid. It affected many fewer people than the 6 million who were left without electricity in March. But it shows the many ways that space weather affects our society. What about the current solar cycle, #24? The Sun appears to have reached peak activity for Solar Cycle 24 in its northern hemisphere. The south continues to produce more and more sunspots. During the decline of a solar cycle the sunspots tend to last longer and the coronal mass ejections can cause large geomagnetic storms. Even though large flares are the heralds of violent space weather, it is the geomagnetic storms that interfere with power grids.
Solar Cycle 24 continues to follow the path of a below average cycle. It is also the best-studied solar cycle, with SDO, SoHO, both STEREO spacecraft, Hinode and numerous ground-based telescopes watching this cycle grow. We study the Sun to know when space weather happens and to learn how to predict it. The images from AIA and HMI are just the beginning of the science of SDO!