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NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which launched in 2010, recently celebrated its five-year anniversary. The three minute video was released by Nasa on Wednesday to celebrate the fifth anniversary of their SDO, and shows the changing surface of the Sun from June 2010 to February 2015.
To celebrate, NASA cut together a stunning time-lapsed video showcasing the amazing vistas that the SDO probe has captured to date. The following are some selected frames from that video.
The new video compresses five years of observations into a few short minutes, but includes beautiful features from the various frequency bands and imaging equipment.
We on Earth tend to think of the sun as static -- so much so, that many cultures refer to it as an example of an object or event that does not change but continues in its course day after day, century after century.
Because relatively few solar events actually cause a change in the superficial appearance of the sun or even result in unusual disturbances to Earth’s magnetic field, it’s easy to imagine that the sun is a unified, unchanging ball of fire.
The SDO is the first mission to be launched for NASA's Living With a Star, a program designed to understand the causes of solar variability and its impacts on Earth.
The SDO probe was designed to measure the structure and creation of the sun’s magnetic field, as well as to investigate how changes within the sun impact the Earth.
The SDO is designed to help us understand the Sun's influence on Earth and Near-Earth space by studying the solar atmosphere on small scales of space and time and in many wavelengths simultaneously.
SDO's goal is to understand, driving towards a predictive capability, the solar variations that influence life on Earth and humanity's technological systems by determining how the Sun's magnetic field is generated and structured how this stored magnetic energy is converted and released into the heliosphere and geospace in the form of solar wind, energetic particles, and variations in the solar irradiance.
The observations made by the SDO could one day lead to better mathematical models that allow us to predict where such mega-flares are likely to form and how much danger they pose to Earth. The probe’s primary mission was scheduled for five years and three months, but it should be able to operate for up to ten years, assuming no equipment failures or other issues.
All images: NASA