A Station Keeping Maneuver in the Spring 2016 Eclipse Season

SDO's Spring 2016 Eclipse Season started on February 19, 2016, with the Earth passing between SDO and the Sun at 0712 UTC that day. The top picture shows the Earth moving across the Sun in an AIA 171 Å image while the bottom picture shows the Earth almost covering the Sun 15 minutes later. Eclipse season runs through March 12, 2016.

On Wednesday, March 2, 2016, SDO will execute stationkeeping maneuver #12 at 2250 UTC (5:50 p.m. ET). Science data will be unavailable for about 45 minutes starting 2235 UTC. These maneuvers are used to help SDO be a good neighbor in the geostationary belt that we pass though twice each day.

Happy Launch Anniversary SDO!

Today is the 6th anniversary of the SDO launch. I was looking for a good picture or movie when this came in my email. It says it all.

Happy Birthday SDO. What a great mission.

January Maneuvers

Last Wednesday SDO did the HMI/AIA roll maneuver, where the satellite spins around to help the scientists better understand the instruments. Here's an example of an image during the roll at 1523 UTC. With the south pole on the left, the filaments look a little like a cat or harlequin!

This afternoon SDO will do the EVE cruciform, moving in a plus sign figure to measure how light reflects inside the instrument. From 1800-2300 UTC (1:00-6:00 pm ET) the Sun will appear to move around and be blurry. Enjoy!

Short Outages in the SDO Website and Data Flow

Since Monday there have been several interruptions in the SDO website and data flow. On Monday a test of the Inertial Reference Units resulted in SDO pointing slightly off center for about 90 minutes. Some data may not be created during that time. On Monday and Tuesday our system administrators were updating the SDO website and, perhaps in anticipation of their impending replacement, one of the older RAIDs failed. There have been several interruptions as the SAs repair the issues and these will continue this week. SDO data continues to flow to the data centers.

2015 was a Very Good Year

2015 was a great year for SDO! We finished our prime mission and began the first extended mission. Several hundred scientific papers appeared describing SDO data. And we made it onto several "Best Of" lists and magazine covers in 2015! Many of these were for the excellent 5th Year movie showing how the Sun changed over the prime mission. SDO was built to show us how the Sun changes in time and having the movie be a "Best Of" image means we doing just that.

Check out these:

Popular Science

Buzzfeed

IFLScience Top 10 Space Images 2015

My favorite image of 2015 was the transit eclipse on Sept. 13, 2015. Here is an example of what that looked like in AIA 171. The sharp curve on the left is the Moon and the blurry curve at the top is the Earth moving out of the way. It was the first transit eclipse seen by SDO (probably a first for NASA) and the only lunar transit seen by SDO that was also seen as a solar eclipse on the Earth. Check out the movies of the transit eclipse at NASA.

I want to thank and congratulate the great team that works to keep SDO data and science flowing.

Even after almost 6 years in orbit SDO is GO!

Data Outages Have Ended

The data outages caused by snow and ice ended Monday morning when the Sun melted the last pieces of ice off of the SDO antennas.
Many thanks to the FOT members who worked to keep the antennas pointed at SDO through a holiday weekend.

Data Outages Due to Snow in Southern New Mexico

Since last night, the SDO science telemetry downlink has been severely degraded due to snow and ice in southern New Mexico. The telemetry files being delivered to the SOCs have been partial for all three instruments. Accumulations of ice and or snow have probably collected on both SDO1 and SDO2 dishes. At the moment, conditions are still poor. The data outages will stop when the severe weather ceases.