{"id":290422,"date":"2010-02-07T11:17:47","date_gmt":"2010-02-07T16:17:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/badastronomy\/?p=11302"},"modified":"2010-02-07T11:17:47","modified_gmt":"2010-02-07T16:17:47","slug":"sdo-launches-on-february-9-bad-astronomy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/290422","title":{"rendered":"SDO launches on February 9 | Bad Astronomy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"sdo\"<\/a>The Solar Dynamics Observatory<\/a>, due for launch on February 9 at 10:30 Eastern time (15:30 GMT), is a revolution in solar observing: equipped with state-of-the art detectors, it’ll stare at the Sun and teach us far more about our closest star than we’ve ever had a chance to before. It’s like SOHO on steroids.<\/p>\n

I was going to write up a lengthy post about it, but then I found out my friend Nicole Gravitationaliotta, aka The Noisy Astronomer, already put together a great post about it<\/a>. That saves me time. <\/p>\n

Something I want to point out: SDO will have a continuous science data streamrate of a whopping 16 megabytes per second<\/strong>. You might want to read that again. That’s 1.4 terabytes per day, or half a petabyte per year<\/em>. Given that a Blu-Ray disk holds 50 gigabytes at most, that means SDO would fill 28 disks a day just to store that data. Cripes. That’s a vast amount of data to sift through. If the Sun is hiding anything, it has about a week to figure out what to do. After that we’ll be watching everything it does.<\/p>\n

\"barbara_thompson\"Also, a fun thing about this for me is that the project scientist for SDO is Barbara Thompson<\/a>, a woman I’ve known a long, long time: her office was across from mine when I was working on Hubble, and I would often drop by to swap stories with her and generally mix it up. It’s very cool to know that an old friend will be helping run such a fantastic astronomical instrument. <\/p>\n

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The Solar Dynamics Observatory, due for launch on February 9 at 10:30 Eastern time (15:30 GMT), is a revolution in solar observing: equipped with state-of-the art detectors, it’ll stare at the Sun and teach us far more about our closest star than we’ve ever had a chance to before. It’s like SOHO on steroids. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":641,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-290422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290422\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}