Abstracts submitted by W. Dean Pesnell
SDO's Contribution to the Study of Solar Transients
W. Dean Pesnell
NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center
Flares and other transients on the Sun are not isolated events. The Sun's magnetic field acts as the source of the transients as well as the source of the nonlocality. The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) is the first Space Weather Mission in NASA's Living With a Star Program. SDO's goal is to understand, driving towards a predictive capability, those solar variations that influence life on Earth and humanity's technological systems. The SDO science investigations will determine how the Sun's magnetic field is generated and structured, how this stored magnetic energy is released into the heliosphere and geospace as the solar wind, energetic particles, and variations in the solar irradiance. One scientific investigation (AIA) will make full-disk images of the Sun in ten wavelengths with a 10-second cadence and a spatial resolution similar to the Trace satellite. These images will be combined to give temperature maps of the lower corona, allowing us to study how coronal loops form, evolve, and dissipate. The full-disk images will allow a chosen active region to be tracked while giving a global context to the changes in that region. SDO is scheduled to launch on an Atlas V rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The satellite will fly in a 28 degree inclined geosynchronous orbit about the longitude of New Mexico for its five-year mission life. The science teams at LMSAL, LASP, and Stanford are responsible for processing, analyzing, distributing, and archiving the science data. We will talk about the data SDO will provide and the science it will enable for NASA and solar research. |
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