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NASA Solar Satellite's First Sun Images
coondoggie writes "NASA today showed off the amazing first pictures of the Sun taken from its 6,800lb Solar Dynamics Observatory flying at an orbit 22,300 miles above Earth. The first images show a variety of activity NASA says provide never-before-seen detail of material streaming outward and away from sunspots. Others show extreme close-ups of activity on the sun's surface. The spacecraft also has made the first high-resolution measurements of solar flares in a broad range of extreme ultraviolet wavelengths."
I believe NetworkWorld may have been less than prudent in failing to put a thumbnail in place of scaling a 4,096 x 4,096 image totaling 8.6 MB down to 300 x 400. Although I guess since they are sourcing it from nasa.gov this slashdotting is going to come at the taxpayer's expense? :-)
I didn't see a link in the article, but here's the original NASA press release.
My work here is dung.
if you look at the article directly, you'll burn out your retinas!
weinersmith
I'd love to see the infrastructure design document from whomever is working at Solar Dynamics Observatory on what they are using for an online disk and long-term storage solution. If they are doing MOC, ingest and data processing/control all in one central location with was mentioned ITFA:
Specifically, NASA says the SDO will beam back 1.5 terabytes of data every day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week
Annually, at it's rawest data form, they house ~548TB (0.5 petabytes)!! I work for a NASA funded land processing project, and with our MODIS ingest from GSFC and ASTER pan ingest from Japan, in 11 years, we've accumulated close to 1.5PB of data. Of course, this is trimmed down and anything we need to generate other data product levels is starting to get housed long-term, but that's a HELL of a long of volume to consume and do fantastic projects with. Hurray for science once again. At least this NASA function still is getting money, eh?
Better article
This is incredible stuff. The CNN author called it "Hubble for the sun" and that's exactly what it is.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Apparently iTunes has morphed into a unit of scale. What is that in Library of Congresses?
"During 2008-2009 NASA scientists noted that the Sun is undergoing a "deep solar minimum," stating: "There were no sunspots observed on 266 of [2008's] 366 days (73%). Prompted by these numbers, some observers suggested that the solar cycle had hit bottom in 2008. Sunspot counts for 2009 have dropped even lower. As of September 14, there were no sunspots on 206 of the year's 257 days (80%). It adds up to one inescapable conclusion: "We're experiencing a very deep solar minimum," says solar physicist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center. "This is the quietest sun we've seen in almost a century," agrees sunspot expert David Hathaway of the National Space Science and Technology Center NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center.
from wikipedia quoting legitimate sources http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_minimum
I'm all for space exploration, but the TFA should at least mention the solar minimum. And isn't http://solarstormwatch.com/ more interestin' anyway?
No, real nerds would argue about the mass of the chick, right in front of her...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
If you look closely, you can see the flag that Louis Armstrong planted on the surface.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
My pleasure!
Something else to think about - you spoke of energy levels - just one of those granules is about the size of the Earth*, and the average temperature at the surface of the sun is around 6000 Kelvin. If the earth was magically transported there, everything on the surface would evaporate instantly, and the oceans would boil completely away in a matter of minutes. The rest of the planet might last a few days, at the most.
We humans, with our fusion weapons, think we have "harnessed the fury of the stars" while in reality we've barely touched upon the energy levels that are common everywhere - and our sun is just a "middle class" star in terms of energy levels. There are phenomenon out there that make our sun look like a spark in a nuclear explosion...
The universe is both beautiful, and terrible beyond imagination.
Welcome to astronomy :) One of the greatest pleasures I find is in expanding minds...
* roughly; the sun is about a million miles in diameter, and granule size varies. It's a close enough approximation, however.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
I found that this link provides access to several high quality movies that downloaded quite quickly. They are very interesting to watch.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)