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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."
...now we're sending a spaceship to the sun?? I hope they're at least sending it at night so it won't get burnt.
...a bright idea.
Just make sure that you hit the thrusters at the right moment or you won't be able to escape the sun's gravity for the slingshot.
--- Do you believe in the day?
A "prodigious rush" is 16 megabytes per second! Now we know.
...sadily the craft is made of asbestos, and we connot recover the data....
So we'll get a little bit of warning that a big flare is on the way, gps is going to be disrupted, and the air-traffic-control system is going to fail.
Excellent!
Dave
I think that I will go outside and rendezvous with the Sun too.
However, even if it isn't going much closer to the Sun than my back yard, it is in a cool orbit.
SDO is a sun-pointing semi-autonomous spacecraft that will allow nearly continuous observations of the Sun with a continuous science data downlink rate of 130 Megabits per second (Mbps). The spacecraft is 4.5 meters high and over 2 meters on each side, weighing a total of 3100 kg (fuel included). SDO's inclined geosynchronous orbit was chosen to allow continuous observations of the Sun and enable its exceptionally high data rate through the use of a single dedicated ground station.
So, it is in a geostationary orbit with the major advantage of the L1 Lagrange point (continuous observations) but requiring less fuel to reach, less power to communicate, and only one ground station (a L1 observatory needs 3, or sufficient on-board recording). That sounds like a major win for this new orbit, which I predict will be used more in the future.
With this orbit, it might also be able to get some cool pictures of Lunar eclipses, which SOHO (at the L1 Lagrange point) can never do.
let scientists better forecast the space weather to offer earlier warnings
In Approximately 8 minutes, there will be a heatwave along the Eastern Coast, as you can tell by our satellite imagery here on the sun. Now to Greg with a sports update.
The loudest noise of any kind at all was clearly the Big Bang (the universe supported sound waves before recombination). It came with a pretty cool light show, too.
For safety, I prefer viewing this performance from 13 billion light years away. At this distance, ear plugs are not necessary.
Lemme guess....you can see Russia, too?
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Do not look at sun with remaining camera.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
You don't rendezvous with something by pointing a camera at it. I'm guessing the guy who wrote the summary either doesn't know what the word means, or is some sort of deluded voyeur? "Yeah, I rendezvous with the chick across the street every night - she NEVER closes her curtains!"
Virtually ALL data from ALL scientific spacecraft is available, right now.
Oh wait, you want to see processed data of interesting things? Yes, that is available too for sun... How about things like,
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime-images.html
Seriously, ALL data is out there and available. Just look for it instead of being just whining on forums about not being fed it trough CNN or Fox or whatever.
I appreciate the link, I didn't mean to whine, I was trying to join the conversation by showing my desire.
Sigh, once I got 5 at the sun stare - though it looked more like a giant ball of light rather than a detailed HDMI of the surface. Unless of course most people are able to comfortably look at the sun, then yes I am a vampire.
The current administration cuts have affected this program. They realise the expense of sending a probe to the sun is costly and a one-way trip.
To reduce these costs and to be able to retrieve their probe the current administration has decided we'll go at night.
They're calling for more than a few days of the year:
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
It's worth noting that magnetic fields of Earth fluctuate and reverse a lot. Glancing at [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal]Wikipedia[/url], it looks like we're in a period of unusually frequent field reversals (on the order of once a million years with considerable randomness) and that the frequency of these reversals has been increasing since the late Cretaceous (the last era of the dinosaurs). As far as I know, no pattern of extinctions have been correlated with magnetic field reversals.
Wasn't this on an episode of Josie & the Pussycats in Space? A bunch of giant aliens captured the ship so they could fly it into their sun to extinguish it. But then those darn kids foiled their plan but suggested they try sunglasses instead.
The launch footage posted on SpaceWeather.com is very impressive.
NASA stole his ship.
Your brain is not a computer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5_0iZQ-TuA
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.