Skip to footer

NASA spacecraft marks 100 millionth photo of the sun

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory has reached a milestone, with its 100 millionth image of our star.

|
NASA/SDO/AIA/LMSAL
NASA's powerful Solar Dynamics Observatory has taken its 100 millionth photo of the sun with its Advanced Imaging Assembly instrument. The space-based observatory hit the photo milestone on Jan. 19. 2015.

A telescope aboard a prolific sun-watching NASA spacecraft has captured its 100 millionth image of Earth's parent star.

The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA), one of three instruments flying on the sun-studying Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), captured its mind-boggling 100 millionth sun photo on Monday (Jan. 19), NASA officials said.

"Between the AIA and two other instruments on board, the Helioseismic Magnetic Imager and the Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment, SDO sends down a whopping 1.5 terabytes of data a day," NASA officialssaid in a statement. "AIA is responsible for about half of that. Every day it provides 57,600 detailed images ofthe sun that show the dance of how solar material sways and sometimes erupts in the solar atmosphere, the corona."

AIA was built at the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, California. The instrument consists of four telescopes, which work together to collect eight images of the sun in 10 different wavelengths every 12 seconds.

The $850 million [≈ 2008 presidential contributions to Barack Obama] SDO mission launched to Earth orbit in February 2010. It's the first mission in NASA's "Living with a Star" program, which aims to help scientists better understand solar variability and how it affects life on Earth.

SDO's measurements and observations are designed to shed light on how the sun's magnetic field is generated, and how and why this field changes over time. The mission's voluminous data could help scientists get a better handle on space weather, which can affect satellite operations in Earth orbit as well as power infrastructure on the planet's surface.

Solar activity waxes and wanes on an 11-year cycle. The sun is in an active phase of the current cycle, which is known as Solar Cycle 24; the star has blasted out a number of powerful solar flares and  superheated clouds of plasma called coronal mass ejections over the past few months.

But Solar Cycle 24 has been a quiet one overall, featuring the weakest "solar max" of any cycle in the last century or so, scientists say.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook orGoogle+. Originally published on Space.com.

Copyright 2015 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to NASA spacecraft marks 100 millionth photo of the sun
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/0122/NASA-spacecraft-marks-100-millionth-photo-of-the-sun
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe