Kind: captions
Language: en
as any space scientist will tell you we
live in a golden age of solar research
thanks to a series of new telescopes
launched in the last two decades we now
have more and better ways to look at the
Sun than ever
before the list of missions responsible
for this new wave of solar research is
long here's a quick introduction to
three key ones you'll be using in the
sun
lab the first is the Soho satellite
which launched in December
1995 a collaboration between NASA and
the European Space Agency Soho bristles
with a dozen telescopes with each one
tuned to a distinct part of the
electromagnetic spectrum Soho brought
new regions of the sun into Focus for
the first
time for example one of its telescopes
uses relatively long wavelengths coming
from the surface to indirectly model the
sun's core but Soho is probably best
known for revolutionizing our
understanding of space
weather within its first year Soho
scientists had learned how to track
coronal mass ejections and figure out
which ones might be headed our way here
Soho captures a period in 2011 when the
sun produced six of these storms in a
single day the next groundbreaking
mission called stereo consists of two
satellites ites since its launch in 2006
stereo a has raced ahead of Earth in its
solar orbit while stereo B has fallen
further behind as the telescopes have
drifted further apart they've provided
increasingly complimentary views of the
sun each day bringing more of it into
view this led to a dramatic moment in
February 2011 for the first time in
human history we had a view of the
entire Sun not just the part facing
Earth
Earth because the sun takes 27 days to
rotate once there used to be plenty of
time for solar activity to develop
without us
noticing now we can see active regions
as soon as they form leading to much
better
forecasting but the newest and most
powerful telescope ever pointed at the
sun is the Solar Dynamics Observatory or
sdo for short think of it like Soho on
steroids from its position near Earth
sdo also looks at many different
wavelengths of solar radiation but more
than once per second it delivers images
10 times more detailed than
HDTV some estimates say this digital
fire hose will transmit 50 times more
science data than any mission in NASA
history in our sunlab you'll see images
from two of sdo's three main
instruments the first is AIA a battery
of four telescopes that can look at 10
different wavelength lengths of light
these range from the sun's surface up to
the highest reaches of the super hot
Corona the key to modeling space weather
the second sdo instrument featured in
the lab is called HMI the H stands for
Helios seismology because it uses sound
waves moving through the surface to
model changing magnetic fields generated
in the convective zone below by mapping
these complex Fields across the entire
Sun HMI helps scientists more quickly
spot the conditions that can lead to
solar
storms of course these are not the only
solar missions and there are more in the
planning stages including one that will
fly right into the sun's Corona so keep
looking not at the sun itself but at the
images coming from our solar telescopes
not only is it safer for your eyes but
you'll see a lot more