Source: The New York Times
There has always been something miraculous about transmissions from space — those thin datastreams trickling toward Earth from research spacecraft. Over the years, the transmissions have grown more and more robust, richer in information, giving us dazzling and detailed panoramas of Saturn’s moons and rings and the surface of Mars. But there has never really been anything like the Solar Dynamics Observatory. Launched in mid-February, it is shipping a torrent of data our way from its orbit above the Sun.
Last week, the Goddard Space Flight Center took the craft online, releasing the first videos and still images it shot. The quality of these images is extraordinary, 10 times the resolution of high-definition television, according to NASA.
We have seen the surface of the Sun before, but never with this clarity. Every 10 seconds, the satellite photographs the solar disk in eight different wavelengths, and what emerges — even in these earliest images — is both stirring and disorienting. The Sun is the most constant object in our lives, but what we see in these videos is a livid, roiling star, mottled and seething on every wavelength. It is a thing of intense, disturbing beauty.
The Solar Dynamics Observatory follows on the work of other important solar projects, including the Solar and Heliographic Observatory and the twin satellites of the project known as Stereo, for Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, which has its own iPhone app. For the next five years and more, this new satellite will be studying the patterns of solar energy that affect life on Earth, like the solar storm that lit up the aurora borealis in the past few weeks and can disrupt navigation and communications. And, in a sense, it creates a new solar effect, which is the ability of humans to peer directly into the most familiar of stars and realize how alien it is.