SDO Post-Launch Check-out

This page contains all the Solar Dynamics Observatory post-launch satellite/instrument check-out activities from Feb. 2010 through May 2010.

• SDO Day 83: EVE Calibration Rocket Launch

  05.04.10 – Check out the launch of the EVE calibration rocket at http://lasp.colorado.edu/rocket/rocket_movies.html. It shows the countdown and the rocket flying away.   More…

• SDO EVE Calibration Rocket Launch Day

  05.03.10 – Today, May 3, at 2:12 pm ET/12:12 pm MT the SDO EVE calibration rocket will launch from White Sands Missile Range, NM. Everything is looking good for an on time launch. No real time video is allowed due to security reasons on the Missile Range, but the CCD data and video from the cameras (one pointing forward, one aft) will be posted as soon as possible.   More…

• SDO Day 78: Just the CCD Facts

  04.28.10 – SDO has 10 CCDs, 8 inside the science instruments and 2 in the star trackers. The science CCDs operate at very low temperatures. The EVE CCDs are 2Kx2K pixels and operate at -100 C. The HMI and AIA CCDs are 4Kx4K and operate at about -70 C. HMI has 2 high-grade visible light CCDs while AIA and EVE treated their CCDs to make them more suitable for detecting extreme ultraviolet light.   More…

• SDO Day 76: Getting Ready for Science Data

  04.26.10 – SDO is moving toward becoming an operational science mission. The data will be available from several sites in a variety of formats. SDO scientists and engineers are working to set up those access points, but we won’t be ready for regular data releases until mid-May. Next step is the EVE calibration rocket, scheduled to fly on May 3, 2010 from the White Sands Missile Range.

• SDO Day 73: The End of Jitter Testing

  04.23.10 – Thursday marked the end of image quality jitter testing on SDO. For the past few days the observatory has spun reaction wheels, rotated high-gain antennas, and moved filter wheels. All this to see how each mechanism affected the staring at the Sun. All of the data must now be analyzed and our fine pointing refined to allow us to stare at the Sun. This week also saw the isolation of the main engine. More…

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  SDO Day 72: First Light Data is Released

  04.22.10 – The principal investigators of the SDO science investigation teams, Philip Scherrer (HMI), Alan Title (AIA), and Tom Woods (EVE) joined Dean Pesnell and Lika Guharthakurta in an SDO First Light press conference yesterday at the Newseum in Washington, DC. The announcement has garnered a lot of press and many examples of those few solar events that saw fit to appear between March 30 and April 8 are now available.

• SDO Day 69: A Weekend Summary

  04.19.10 – Over the weekend SDO completed the HMI roll maneuvers and began preparing for the image quality jitter tests. The next major activity is to isolate the main engine. First, the isolation pyros on the main engine will be fired to isolate the Helium pressurant and main engine from the observatory. After that is the first 2 Nms delta-H thruster maneuver, used to dissipate momentum.

• SDO Day 65: Calibration Maneuvers

  04.16.10 – The EVE cruciform maneuver was completed yesterday. Other tests included the high-gain antenna handover with stagger stepping and no-step requests. These tests are required to keep the observatory from moving too much while taking an image with HMI and possibly AIA. Next Tuesday we plan to have an Delta-H thruster burn. These momentum unloads are required to keep the reaction wheels spinning at the correct speeds.   More…

• NASA, Newseum to Debut Images from Unique Solar Spacecraft

  04.14.10 – NASA will hold a news briefing and unveil initial images from the Solar Dynamic Observatory, or SDO, at 2:15 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, April 21, in the atrium of the Newseum.

• SDO Day 63: More Tests

  04.14.10 – Today SDO ran the EVE Field of View and HMI/AIA Flat Field calibration maneuvers. HMI tested the re-transmission capability of the DDS by asking for re-transmissions of files that were not successfully transferred.

• SDO Day 62: Still Testing After All These Weeks

  04.13.10 – SDO continued instrument calibration for the past few days. These included an EVE cruciform and guide telescope monthly calibration. During the cruciform scan SDO left inertial mode (an attitude-control mode) and went into sun-acquisition mode. This was traced to a wrong number in a filter that slowly pushed the spacecraft in the wrong direction until an automated response caused SDO to enter sun-acquisition mode. The number was fixed and the GT calibration was run.   More…

• SDO Day 58: Rolls are Complete

  04.09.10 – Our initial Science Reference Boresight was defined Friday. This is the target for the fine-guidance system in science mode, or it is the imaginary line that leaves SDO and hits the center of the Sun. All of the instruments can then figure out where they are pointed with very high accuracy. SDO completed several calibration maneuvers this week, with more coming in next 10 days. Last nite the HMI/AIA roll was done.   More…

• SDO EVE Rocket Arrives at White Sands

  04.08.10 – PI Tom Woods and crew arrived in White Sands Missile Range, NM to integrate the EVE calibration rocket on Monday and perform initial checkouts of the payload to make sure it survived. All is going well, and the launch has been moved up to May 3. Upcoming tasks next week are the environmental tests – vibe, spin balance, and bend test. Hopefully we can get ITAR and security approval for pictures quickly and post those here in the near future.

• SDO Day 55: Cruciforms and Raster Scans

  04.06.10 – Last evening the EVE cruciform was completed and the high-gain antenna raster resumed. A cruciform scan is a slow scan in a line through the Sun from East to West and another north to South, about 2.5 degrees in each direction. This is used to map out the field of view of the instrument. The high-gain antennas move quite a bit over a year and the raster scans are used to calibrate the pointing of the antennas.

• SDO Day 54: A Day of Reflection

  04.05.10 – Sunday was a day to reflect on all of the data we have collected so far on the interaction of the instruments and the spacecraft. This week we begin a series of instrument calibration maneuvers and more testing of the high-gain antennas. First up is the EVE cruciform maneuver.

• SDO Day 52: Instrument Jitter and Guide Telescopes

  04.03.10 – Today the instruments examined how they affect the pointing of SDO. Filters and shutters inside the instruments have to rotate into new positions before each exposure, so SDO has a lot things spinning around. Each instrument ran their filters wheels and shutters to see how SDO moved. After that they tested the guide telescopes that are part of AIA. The “Science Reference Boresight” is determined by these guide telescopes, so understanding their behavior is crucial to SDO.

• SDO Day 51: High-gain Antennas and Jitter

  04.02.10 – SDO spent another day measuring the jitter of the spacecraft, this time how the motion of the two high-gain antennas affected the pointing of the instruments. The instrument teams helped with these tests while continuing to understand their own observing sequences.

• SDO Day 50: The Wheels on the Spacecraft Bus Go Round and Round

  04.01.10 – Today SDO worked to understand how the reaction wheels that provide our fine pointing control interact with the spacecraft. SDO needs to point at the Sun very accurately while taking an image every 0.75 seconds (which means rotating shutters and filters), rotating the high-gain antennas to keep them pointed toward New Mexico, and rotate the entire observatory once per orbit to keep it pointed at the Sun.    More…

• SDO Day 49: The Future

  03.31.10 – The doors are open and the CCDs are cold, what’s next? For the next several weeks SDO scientists and engineers will work to check out and calibrate the instruments and to coordinate the spacecraft and instruments. I may call it “Focus and Center” but it is a busy time for everyone on SDO making sure these complex instruments do what is needed to get our data. In mid-April we plan to show the world how great the instruments are working at a “First Light Media Telecon.”

• SDO Day 48: AIA Gets Cool

  03.30.10 – All of the instruments are now working with doors open and cold CCDs. Around 20:00 UT Monday the AIA CCD heaters were turned off, upon which the CCD temperatures dropped rapidly from about +40C to -70C then slowly settled towards their final temperatures. With that drop in temperature, we saw the camera background decrease markedly, and the image quality in all channels improve dramatically.  More…

• SDO Day 47: A Weekend of Work

  03.29.10 – SInce opening all nine doors, work has continued getting the instruments ready for normal science operations. HMI continues to work on sequences and the image stabilization system. EVE is working on understanding their data. AIA is looking at solar images superimposed on the thermal background of their still-warm CCDs and updated their on-board flight software.

• SDO Day 45: AIA Doors are Opened

  03.27.10 – The AIA team members at the MOC celebrate the successful opening of all four AIA telescope doors by 15:30 UTC (11:30 am ET) on Saturday. The doors were opened in the order (by telescope number): 1, 4, 3, and 2. The AIA CCDs are still warm. On Monday the decontamination heaters will be turned off, and the sequencer will be started so the CCD cool-down can be observed. All nine SDO instrument doors are now open.

• SDO Day 45: EVE Doors Open and the Sun Celebrates

  03.27.10 – Almost immediately after the EVE doors opened active region 11057 provided some fireworks and let loose with 4 C-class flares! Here is a graph from the NOAA SWPC in Boulder, CO showing the GOES X-ray fluxes. The EVE doors were all opened by 19:43 UTC, and the flares started at 21:08 UTC. EVE will study the energetics of such flares while HMI and AIA tell us how and why they form. Welcome to Solar Cycle 24.

• SDO Date 44: EVE Door Opened

  03.26.10 – At 3:43 pm ET all four EVE doors were open. HMI and AIA were able to measure the jolt of the doors. AIA doors are to be opened tomorrow.

• SDO Date 44: Spacecraft Jitter Tests

  03.26.10 – Thursday was spent testing the “jitter” of the observatory. Why do we care? SDO needs to keep its imaging telescopes pointed at the Sun with a steady hand. Our pixels image an area of the Sun that is about 0.5″ across. While that’s a patch the size of New Mexico on the Sun, it easier to think of it in terms of a quarter.

• SDO Day 42: HMI Opens Door, West Coast Style

  03.25.10 – During the HMI door opening a large part of the HMI team was at Stanford. They celebrated the successful door opening and our first chance to see what the HMI instrument will do for solar studies.

• SDO Day 42: HMI Opens Door

  03.24.10 – At 11:00 am EST this morning HMI began opening their door. This door protected the front window and optics from damage but can now be opened to let the Sun shine in. Sunlight was used to illuminate the front window and study the optical performance of the telescope. A sunspot could be seen in these engineering images.

• SDO Day 42: The Doors Begin To Open

  03.24.10 – This morning the HMI door will be opened. Engineering images to test HMI will begin to flow. These will start with pictures of the door opening that allow the HMI team to study scattered light inside the instrument.

• HMI CCDs Are Cold, EVE CCDs Are Cooling

  03.23.10 – The instrument teams of SDO began their work to start taking data. HMI allowed its CCDs to cool over the weekend and EVE started the cooldown cycle on Tuesday. AIA plans to watch the Sun while their CCDs cool to operational temperatures later this week. The Ka-band transmitter was turned on and high-rate (150 Mbps) data is flowing to the SOCs.

• A Busy Day for the Instruments

  03.20.10 – Friday was a day to run in science mode. SDO ran all three instruments over night with test patterns. The EVE instrument completed its component check outs.

• From Tom Woods, EVE PI

  03.19.10 – Great news for EVE: all of the EVE subsystems are now turned on and all are doing very well !!! We turned on ESP, MEGS-A CCD, and MEGS-B CCD for this first time this morning. Their dark data look fine. Every component looks healthy.

• Ka-band Up And Running

  03.18.10 – Wednesday was a very good day for the SDO observatory and team. The Ka-band transmitter was turned on, the antennas pointed at the ground station, and data started to flow. Both ground antennas locked immediately and had good signal strength. HMI and AIA generated test pattern data, which was transmitted to the ground and forwarded to the JSOC without any errors.

• SDO Is On Station

  03.16.10 – The third Trim Motor Firing (TMF #3) was successfully completed Tuesday evening. This apogee burn raised our perigee to geosynchronous with an orbital period of one day. SDO is on station, next is to start up the instruments!

• Tracking SDO’s Attitude With the Stars

  03.16.10 – How does SDO know where it is pointing? Seems easy, just point at the brightest object in the sky! But what about our roll angle around the Sun, or where is the Sun’s North Pole? SDO uses star trackers to measure its attitude. CCD images are compared to a library to see where the star tracker is pointed. Once we know where the star trackers point we can figure out our roll angle on the Sun.

• TMF-2 Complete, On To TMF-3 And Final Orbit!

  03.14.10 – Trim Motor Firing #2 was successfully completed this morning. This was different from our previous burns in being a perigee burn to raise apogee. The final orbit trim maneuver, TMF-3, is scheduled for Tuesday evening. It will be an apogee burn to raise perigee to geosynchronous and our period to one day per orbit.

• TMF #1 Completed, Perigee Now 35.3 Mm

  03.12.10 – The first Trim Motor Firing (TMF #1) was successfully completed Thursday evening. This apogee burn raised our perigee to 35,300 km, an orbital period of 23.6 hr. This means we are drifting 6 degrees to the east in every orbit. Two more thruster burns will be done, TMF #2 is a perigee burn to raise the apogee to its final value and TMF #3 is an apogee burn to raise the perigee to its final value.

• Main Engine Plumbing Is Vented

  03.10.10 – Tuesday night the main engine fuel and oxidizer lines were vented. SDO will now fly on thrusters for orbit station keeping and momentum control. Many thanks to the SDO propulsion team for building SDO’s bi-prop system, the first to be designed and built at Goddard. Our next orbital maneuver (TMF #1) is scheduled for Thursday evening.

• AMF-8 Moves SDO Perigee Altitude To 34.6 Mm

  03.09.10 – Apogee Motor Firing #8, the last orbit raising maneuver, was successfully completed Monday night. This burn raised the SDO perigee altitude to about 34,600 km for a period of about 23 hr. With this orbit SDO will appear to drift eastward toward our final longitude.

• A Successful AMF-7 Burn!

  03.06.10 – A successful Apogee Motor Firing #7 continued the string of smooth Main Engine burns since we removed the structural filter and lengthened the settling burn. AMF-7 raised our perigee altitude to approximately 25000 km, giving SDO an orbital period of about 19.2 hours. This sets SDO for one last trip “around the world” before Monday’s AMF-8 actually moves SDO into a nearly geosynchronous orbit.

• Our Orbit So Far

  03.04.10 – Here is the SDO orbit so far. The initial GTO, two intermediate orbits, and the estimated final orbit are shown to scale. Apogee Motor Firings (AMFs) all take place at the apogee of the orbit (the left side of the diagram) and are designed to lift the perigee (where SDO is closest to the Earth) up to a geosynchronous altitude. A few trim maneuvers will then move SDO into its final orbit. Perigee values are altitudes (height above the Earth).

• AMF-6 Main Engine Burn Raises Perigee Altitude To 20 Mm

  03.03.10 – Apogee Motor Firing #6 was successfully completed Tuesday evening. The burn used about 6 minutes of ACS thruster firing and 13 minutes of Main Engine firing. This maneuver raised the SDO perigee altitude to about 20,100 km, or a period of 17.4 hr. The GNC team reported that the Main Engine burn was extremely quiet and the momentum disturbance due to the fuel sloshing was minimal. Due to the equipment outage at the Santiago ground station, most of ranging this evening was performed by SDOGS.

• AMF-5, A Combined Thrusters And Main Engine Burn, Raises Perigee Above 15 Mm

  03.01.10 – Apogee Motor Firing #5 used the ACS thrusters and main engine to raise the perigee altitude of SDO to about 15,000 km on the way to our target of 35,800 km. (Using Kepler’s law, my estimate of the current orbital period is about 15.4 hr.) We had a very smooth burn so we will use the main engine for the next burn that is scheduled for Tuesday evening.

• AMF-4 Complete, Perigee Altitude Raised Above 10 Mm

  02.27.10 – Apogee Motor Firing #4, a 50-minute burn using the ACS thrusters, was performed successfully on Friday. Our perigee altitude is now greater than 10,000 km as it continues to move away from the Earth toward a circular GEO orbit. The Slosh Tiger Team is recommending some tweaking to the ACS controller to allow main engine burns to resume. We are meeting today to discuss a “hybrid” burn for Sunday, 40 minutes on the ACS thrusters, followed by a 10-minute main engine burn.

• Instrument Checkout And Testing Continues

  02.26.10 – Thursday on SDO: HMI & AIA completed their initial mechanism checkouts. Every instrument mechanism was moved in both directions. With the initial checkout complete HMI began their mechanism functional tests and completed testing the shutter mechanisms. The remainder of the HMI and AIA functional mechanism tests are scheduled for Saturday. EVE powered on their CCD survival patch heater.

• SDO Went Into Science Control Mode

  02.25.10 – SDO operated its ACS Science Control Mode for the first time on Thursday. In “science mode” the spacecraft uses AIA Guide Telescope signals for fine sun-pointing control. SDO stayed in science mode for more than an hour after which it was commanded back to inertial mode. Science mode worked very well.

• EVE Team Prepares For Calibration Rocket

  02.24.10 – While the EVE team continues to be busy with instrument commissioning, there is another task at hand that is critical to the success of the EVE instrument. This is preparing the first of five calibration sounding rockets that is set to launch May 5 from White Sands Missile range outside of Las Cruces, New Mexico. This sounding rocket carries an almost exact replica EVE instrument as the satellite version SDO EVE instrument.

• AMF-3 Burn Completed

  02.24.10 – Apogee Motor Firing #3, a 50-minute burn using the ACS thrusters, completed this evening with no issues.

• SDO Launch Is the Astronomy Picture of the Day

  02.23.10 – The waves created by the SDO Launch are the Astronomy Picture of the Day for February 23, 2010. You can see the sundog on the right side of the picture and the rocket in the middle.

• A Great Day For Instruments!

  02.23.10 – HMI powered on the Image Stabilization System and both cameras. The operational heaters set points were increased from 10C to 15C and are controlling the instrument temperature nicely. The instrument is responding nominally.

• AMF 2B Raises Perigee By 1500 km

  02.22.10 – Orbit circularization maneuver AMF #2B, using the ACS thrusters, was accomplished successfully tonight. The burn was 50 minutes long (as designed), and all hardware and software performed as expected. There is now quite a bit more data for the continuing fuel slosh analysis, and the perigee has been increased by approximately 1500 km.

• Second Main Engine Firing Stopped Early By Spacecraft

  02.21.10 – February 19, 2010 – The second Apogee Motor Firing (AMF #2) this evening was autonomously aborted after 30 seconds due to high system momentum. The Observatory is safe, the on-board system detected an unexpectedly high momentum, aborted the burn, and returned the Observatory to sun-pointing.