A planned outage is scheduled for Tuesday, March 7, 2017. The outage will begin at approximately 8AM and will last until approximately 3PM. The website and all browse image products, movies, and RSS feeds will be taken off line for the duration.
Monday, March 6, 2017
Thursday, February 9, 2017
Happy Launch-versary SDO!
Seven years ago Saturday the Solar Dynamics Observatory rose into the Florida skies atop an Atlas V rocket. It was a spectacular sight that put a spectacular mission into orbit. To celebrate, here are some pictures of the models in my office with a solar spectrum lighting them up. (A prism in the window creates the spectrum. It's fun to watch people's reactions when it is displayed on the wall across the hall.)
On the left is the booster model and the right is a little display model of SDO. You can see more of the spectrum around the shadow of the nosecone. I think the rainbow looks pretty good on them. Reminds me of the sundog we saw during launch all those years ago.
SDO has helped to create over 2600 scientific papers since we began producing science data in May 2010. We are very happy that many young scientists are able to “cut their research teeth” in one of the 49 PhD dissertations that have been written using SDO data and science. People keep using helioviewer to look through the images and make movies.
Thanks for using our data. Many thanks to the science teams that keep SDO running.
Happy Launch-versary SDO!
Wednesday, January 11, 2017
January 2017 Maneuvers
Today SDO will perform the EVE Field-of-View calibration maneuver between 1315-1600 UTC (8:15-11:00 A.M. ET) and the HMI Offpoint calibration maneuver between 1630-1907 UTC (11:30 a.m.- 2:07 p.m. ET). During calibration maneuvers HMI magneto grams and Dopplergrams will not be available and AIA images will not be centered and may be blurry.
Last Wednesday, January 4, 2017, SDO successfully executed Momentum Management burn #28. Science data is not available during the 30 minutes of the burn.
The EVE Cruciform calibration maneuver will take place next Wednesday at 1700 UCT (noon ET) and the HMI Roll on January 25, 2017, at 1500 UTC (10:00 a.m. ET).
Thursday, December 29, 2016
Website Maintenence - 12/29/16
We are conducting planned maintenance on the SDO website. There may be outages or interrupted service. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your patience.
Sunday, December 18, 2016
Planned Activities for January 2017
Another New Year is upon us and it is time to plan the next set of SDO calibration maneuvers. This includes the leap second that needs to be applied just before January starts. Why do we care about leap seconds? SDO moves about 3 km each second (about 1.9 miles every second). So does every other object in orbit near SDO. We all have to use the same time to make sure our collision avoidance programs are accurate. So we all add a leap second to the end of 2016, delaying 2017 by one second.
Our schedule of maneuvers is:
Our schedule of maneuvers is:
Monday, October 31, 2016
Lunar Transit of October 30, 2016
Wednesday, October 19, 2016
The Next Two Weeks in SDO History
Next week, on October 26, 2016, SDO will perform the EVE Field of View calibration maneuver at 1315 UTC (9:15 am ET) and the HMI/AIA Flatfield calibration maneuver at 1630 UTC (2:30 pm ET).
During calibration maneuvers SDO science data may be unavailable, blurry, or otherwise not usable. On the other hand, the images can be fun to look at! At left is an AIA 304 image showing how SDO is tipped up a little during the first leg of the cruciform.
On October 30, 3016, SDO will experience a Lunar Transit between 1956 and 2056 UTC (3:56 and 4:56 pm ET). The Moon will cover about 59% of the Sun at the peak of this transit.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)