This great new video (just uploaded today!) does a great job of explaining the upcoming Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) mission, which is slated to launch on Feb. 9, 2010. SDO will provide a new eye on the sun that will deliver solar images with 10 times better resolution than high-definition television. This mission will zoom in on the cause of severe space weather—solar activity such as sunspots, solar flares, and coronal mass ejections. It will give us the best look ever at our Sun.
For more information see our detailed preview article on SDO.
Thanks to those who have found a way to extend where SOHO led! HO!
Go SDO, but this movie aims really really low.
I mean – look, we’re going to animate the words “big”, “data”, and “inside”, so as not burden your brains with the interpretation of such vague and complex concepts.
We’ll also put a guy in a T-shirt, since we’re cool.
Shrug. Whatever gets the dollars going, but it’s a shame.
There will be staggering amounts of data, and this will be run through supercomputer algorithms. Space science has gone a long way from the days of Explorer 1, which carried up a little gieger counter and detected the magnetically bottled charged particles Van Allen predicted. Here the motion of the solar surface will be detected across the apprent disk to make solar seismic detections. This is what is meant by “inside,” and in effect the interior can by inverse scattering techniques and numerical tomography be constructed in a model.
LC