A.C. Restored at Stanford, HMI & AIA Images are Flowing

The air conditioning at Stanford has been repaired and images are once again flowing to the right places. While the 48 hours of catchup is being played some images may be seen in the wrong order as a `latest' file. This is normal during the replay of the telemetry but the usual flow should be seen tomorrow morning.

No A.C. at Stanford, HMI & AIA Images Not Available

Chilled water is still off at Stanford and HMI and AIA images remain unavailable. Best estimate is they will be available Monday afternoon.

No A.C. at Stanford, HMI & AIA Images Not Available

Late last night the air conditioning at Stanford University stopped. HMI & AIA images will not be available until the problem is solved, possibly Monday. The science data is unaffected, but we do not have access to the computer drives that hold the images.

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!

Maneuvers this Week

Wednesday at 1930 UTC (3:30 pm ET, 12:30 pm PT) SDO will perform a Delta-H maneuver. This is designed to keep the fine-guidance system within limits by using a series of short burns on the thrusters.
Thursday we will do two more maneuvers. The EVE Field-of-View maneuver will start at 1315 UTC (9:15 am ET) and the HMI/AIA Flatfield at 1630 UTC (12:30 pm ET).
Before, during, and after a maneuver SDO data may be unavailable.

A Busy Week for SDO

It has been a busy week for SDO. On Tuesday we did an EVE cruciform maneuver, where we point SDO back and forth and up and down to explore how EVE is working. At left is an AIA image taken during the cruciform.
On Wednesday the Hi-C rocket lifted off from White Sands Missile Range (just over the mountains from the SDO ground station) and took high-resolution images of the Sun. I haven't seen any images yet, but I'm sure they will look great!

Next, on Thursday we watched an X1.4 flare bloom out of AR 1520 (circled in the AIA 193 image at left.) The last X-class flare was from AR 1515 when it was near the limb (the right side of the Sun), so seeing one at disk center is pretty nice. We even got some news stories written about this flare:

• Sun unleashes most powerful solar flare of the summer (msnbc.com) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48166317/ns/technology_and_science-space/
• X-Class Solar Flare Causes Radio Outages (U.S. News & World Report): http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/07/12/x-class-solar-flare-causes-radio-outages
• Major Solar Flare Erupts From Giant Sunspot (Space.com): http://www.space.com/16560-major-solar-flare-erupts-giant-sunspot.html
• Sun uncorks X-class blast (USA Today): http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2012/07/sun-uncorks-x-class-blast/1

With 2 X-class flares in 2 week it looks like the southern hemisphere is moving toward solar maximum!

SDO Shirts and Caps are On Sale

The SDO Apparel store has been temporarily re-opened. I'm not sure how long it will be open, so act quickly to purchase customized SDO shirts (see picture to left), caps, or backpacks. The store is a non-NASA website at http://sdo.eliteimagestore.com.
Please pass the information along to any interested people.
Enjoy!