Sun, Feb 14, 2010
Mission Is To Help Understand The Sun's Dynamic Processes
NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, lifted off Thursday
from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Launch Complex 41 on a
first-of-its-kind mission to reveal the sun's inner workings in
unprecedented detail. The launch aboard a United Launch Alliance
Atlas V rocket occurred at 1023 EST.
The most technologically advanced of NASA's heliophysics
spacecraft, SDO will take images of the sun every 0.75 seconds and
daily send back about 1.5 terabytes of data to Earth -- the
equivalent of streaming 380 full-length movies. "This is going to
be sensational," said Richard R. Fisher, director of the
Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "SDO is
going to make a huge step forward in our understanding of the sun
and its effects on life and society."
The sun's dynamic processes affect everyone and everything on
Earth. SDO will explore activity on the sun that can disable
satellites, cause power grid failures, and disrupt GPS
communications. SDO also will provide a better understanding of the
role the sun plays in Earth's atmospheric chemistry and
climate.
SDO is the crown jewel in a fleet of NASA missions to study our
sun. The mission is the cornerstone of a NASA science program
called Living With A Star. This program will provide new
understanding and information concerning the sun and solar system
that directly affect Earth, its inhabitants and technology.
The SDO project is managed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
in Greenbelt, MD. NASA's Launch Services Program at Kennedy Space
Center managed the payload integration and launch.
"This launch culminates years of hard work by our NASA customer
and our ULA launch team," said Mark Wilkins, ULA Vice President,
Atlas Product Line. "It's appropriate that our 100th use of a
commercial Atlas Centaur was for a NASA mission since Centaur was
originally developed for NASA's lunar program."
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