Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

NASA Solar Satellite's First Sun Images

Posted by samzenpus on from the picture-in-the-sun dept.

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."

5 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. Rather Large Image for the Article by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  2. Careful! by martas · · Score: 5, Funny

    if you look at the article directly, you'll burn out your retinas!

    --
    weinersmith
    1. Re:Careful! by oldspewey · · Score: 5, Funny

      Do not look at article with remaining eye.

      --
      If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
  3. Holy Amounts of data! by adosch · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  4. Re:Video by shadowbearer · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.