Our limited view was due to the fact that the Sun's roughly 27-day rotation hid the far side from our current crop of observational instruments, like the Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO. The SDO and its companion the Michelson Doppler Imager, while invaluable, can only produce a reconstruction of the activity on the far side of the Sun.
In a technologically-dependent world such as ours, this limited view was dangerous. Solar storms and coronal mass ejections, commonplace in our solar system, could easily build on the unmonitored far side of the Sun before launching toward Earth to knock out our satellites and on-world electronics. We could be, and have been, caught unaware.
To better prepare for these storms, NASA launched STEREO in 2006. Short for the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, this pair of spacecraft follows Earth's orbit—one ahead and one behind—to offer unprecedented views of our life-giving Sun. As of today, they've finally reached a point along our orbit that gives a full 360-degree view of the Sun:
The current mission will continue for another eight years before STEREO A and B switch places on the far side of the Sun, and begin again.
30 comments:
Awesome, I actually feel much safer now! Whoo!!
yes this is very nice :D
Yea i heared about it. People dont realize how hard it is to capture all the light and show it in high quality.
thats awesome! will the release the actual photo?
wow this is a great blog!
so whats it do?!
-metalcore
Wow that's great news actually! Be sure to post pictures if they decide to publish them.
dAT'S friggin' cool man.
i can't wait until we can explore more of our system
Pretty interesting. Should prove to be useful in the future for NASA.
It's pretty crazy it took us this long to manage this
Yeah, actually seeing the pictures would be really neat.
Hmm interesting. I wonder what use it could have in the near future.
Amazing! I can't wait to see maybe a 3d model of it in real-time or a 360 view in HD pictures. Great post!
its amazing!
Must say this was a pretty interesting read. Thanks Blogger!
Cool. Guess we know now that there aren't any aliens living on the other side XD
http://anon408.blogspot.com
Very exciting times we live in :)
Very interesting to read, thanks for sharing
Wow great, I would love to see some pics.
wow thats pretty amazing, lol, now if we can only colonize mars
nice blog! :-)
So is the world coming to an end in 2012?
Yay, science!
Good to see that NASA is actually still doing interesting things
Wow, awesome!
the sun can still fuck us up. i got a sunburn on my face last summer. rage.
what a surreal thing to think about.. we can see the entire sun, this giant celestial body magnitudes larger than our own planet...
randomramblingggg.blogspot.com
great! I couldnt see it all before. This is just fabulous. I feel so happy.....I could totally notice; I was near giving up but now the whole sun is visible I have something to live for!
although nasa have found 50 planets that are habital and at least 6 which have water. all very interesting isnt it? ;)
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