July 15, 2009 -- NASA is preparing to launch an orbital observatory that can pick apart the inner workings of the sun. The project is an attempt to improve predictions of space weather events that can impact GPS and other satellite systems, radio transmissions and power grids on Earth.
The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) is part of a NASA program called "Living With a Star," which is focused on understanding how the sun impacts life on Earth.
SDO arrived in Florida last week to begin final testing and fueling for launch in November from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Its mission is slated to begin just as the sun shifts into a new 11-year cycle. The next period of maximum activity is expected to peak in May 2013.
"We would really like to put our instruments on a relatively unblemished sun and look what happens as we go into solar max," SDO project scientist Dean Pesnell told Discovery News.
Since the last solar max in 2002, modern life has become more dependent on GPS, mobile phones and other technologies that are vulnerable to geomagnetic outbursts and other solar events.
Currently, space weather forecasters have about an hour's lead time to predict geomagnetic storms. To develop longer-range forecasts, solar physicists use computer models based on observations of the sun's surface.
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SDO is designed to make detailed maps of the magnetic fields at the sun's surface, which will improve the computer models' accuracy. It also will simultaneously monitor sound waves passing through the sun's interior to detect magnetic regions that frequently precede solar storms.
"We can see the winds underneath the surface and we can see the magnetic fields at the same," Pesnell said. "Those winds are what generate electrical currents, which make magnetic fields, which we see as solar activity."
The goal of SDO is to improve predictions of space weather events from about an hour’s advance notice to perhaps two weeks, said Thomas Bogdan, director of NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo.
SDO builds on a legacy of highly successful solar probes, including the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, known as SOHO, and NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer, or ACE.
The observatory operates using three instruments: the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, which will snap multi-wavelength images of the sun every 10 seconds; the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager, which monitors low-frequency sound waves inside the sun, and the Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment, which focuses on changes in solar short-wave ultraviolet radiation.NASA has funded SDO for an initial five-year mission at a cost of about $850 million.
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