SDO (Solar Dynamics Observatory)
On this wiki page we provide information about the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) satellite, where we specifically focus on the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument.
The SDO satellite was launched in February 2011 to study the solar atmosphere at small scales with high spatial and temporal resolution. This provides information on solar variability and its influence on the Earth's space environment.
This instrument is used to study the magnetic field on the solar surface (photosphere). It provides solar full disk observations at 6173 Å with a resolution of 1 arcsecond. HMI dataproducts:
- dopplergrams (maps of solar surface velocity),
- continuum filtergrams (broad-wavelength photographs of the solar photosphere),
- and both line-of-sight and vector magnetograms (maps of the photospheric magnetic field).
The AIA instruments captures observations in the solar atmosphere in the ultraviolet (UV) and extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) with a spatial resolution of 1.5 arcsec and a temporal resolution of 12 s.
Source: https://aia.lmsal.com/public/instrument.htm
The EVE instrument measures spectral irradiance in the EUV with high spectral resolution, temporal cadence, and precision. This is particular important for variability estimations on small time scales which can have an impact on Earth and its surrounding environment. The instrument is split into the subsystem consisting of the:
- MEGS (Multiple EUV Grating Spectrograph),
- ESP (EUV SpectroPhotometer) and,
- the EEB (EVE Electronics Box).
- Level 0: raw images with a resolution of 4096x4096
- Level 1: Dark and flat field corrected and flipped such that solar observation are rotated north up
- Level 1.5: S/C residual roll removed (aligning) and fits keyword updates
SDO dataproducts can be downloaded from the JSOC website: http://jsoc.stanford.edu/
For more information about the SDO mission, see: https://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/