Transcripts of sdo_overview_appletv.m4v

<<music, sound effects>> <<music>> Dean Pesnell: The Sun is different every time we look at it. Those changes in the Sun we see here at the Earth as well. We call those effects here at the Earth "Space Weather." The Living With a Star program was developed at NASA to bring together all the people who study space weather. The Solar Dynamics Observatory is the first mission of NASA's Living With a Star program. It's designed to study the Sun --the root of space weather. SDO has a couple of improvements. The easiest one to think about is that we have better cameras. We take a camera that's twice as big as the best one in space, and we fly a whole bunch of them on a satellite. Our cameras are 4K by 4K pixels, so that's about 16 million pixels sitting on each camera. We can see images of the full disk of the Sun. To see the whole sun in high resolution is better than seeing just a little bit of the Sun in high resolution. If we look at a little bit of the sun, and we see something happen, every once in a while, we'll see that something came in from the side. So you're sitting there watching it and you say, "Ooh, that's cool! That's what I wanted to study! How did that happen? Why did that happen?" So, you widen out. So now you see what you wanted to see, and you see that wave come in. But the most important thing is that we're gonna take pictures very frequently. The best we've done so far were full disk images of the sun is every three minutes. And we're gonna take 'em every ten seconds. That's a lot faster, and we'll be able to see things that happen on the Sun very quickly that right now we skip, we just--we miss. It's like we look at the tops of the mountains and we miss the valleys in between. SDO will also study the amount of energy the Sun puts off in extreme ultraviolet wavelengths. These are very short wavelengths that get absorbed very high up in our atmosphere --causes the atmosphere to heat, expand, and bring satellites out of orbit. Previous missions have looked at the extreme ultraviolet irradiance every...90 minutes. We're gonna look at it every ten seconds. And we're gonna see a lot of new stuff, and we're gonna learn a lot. The magnetic field is also looked at. We know that this is important because we've never understood the direction of the magnetic field before. And that's part of our research--is to figure out what's happening to the magnetic field of the Sun, and by knowing its direction, that gives us another piece of information to understand where it comes from and how it gets converted into solar activity. The instruments on SDO are designed to work together. One measures magnetic field, one measures what the magnetic field does, and one measures what we see that affects us here at the Earth. SDO would like to be able to predict space weather so that we can look at the Sun, know something's going to happen, and call people up and let them know. <<music>> <<music>> <<music>> <<sound effects>> <<sound effects>> <<silence>>