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NASA Solar Probe Blasts Toward Rendezvous With Sun

coondoggie writes "NASA this morning used a United Launch Alliance Atlas rocket to blast its 6,800lb Solar Dynamics Observatory into an orbit 22,300 miles above Earth. The $808 million spacecraft will ultimately study the Sun and send back what NASA called a prodigious rush of pictures about sunspots, solar flares and a variety of other never-before-seen solar events. The idea is to get a better idea of how the Sun works and let scientists better forecast the space weather to offer earlier warnings to protect astronauts and satellites, NASA said."

2 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Prodigious rush by Infiniti2000 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don't know about the rest of you, but a little piece of me died inside when I read the comparison to iTunes: "It's like downloading 500,000 iTunes a day, NASA stated." Are comparisons to iTunes downloads really needed in today's world?

  2. Re:First we bomb the moon... by repka · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What's wrong about the sentence? It was pretty much copied from TFA... The orbit is almost geostationary, considering the distance, so it's not like it'll be doing 8's around Earth and Moon, like Apollo crafts.