EXPANDING THE CAPABILITIES OF SOLAR DYNAMICS OBSERVATORY

Need & Challenge

The NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) is a mission designed to understand the causes of solar variability and its impacts on Earth. It generates terabytes of data every day and constantly monitors the Sun with a 12 second cadence and with 4K x 4K pixel (at 0.06 arcsec/pixel) images since 2010.

UV and EUV instruments in orbit suffer time-dependent degradation which reduces instrument sensitivity. Accurate calibration for EUV instruments currently depend on sounding rockets (e.g. for SDO/EVE, and SDO/AIA), which are costly and infrequent. Furthermore, such calibration experiments are not practical for missions in deep space (e.g. STEREO satellites). Using the SDO data, we propose to exploit spatial patterns in multi-wavelength observations to arrive at a auto-calibration of (E)UV imaging instruments.

The capabilities of Heliophysics missions are limited by the cost of launch, of instrument development and of telemetry. We propose the development of a virtual telescope that can generate desired science data products using fewer measurements (e.g. fewer EUV channels) as a possible solution to mitigate these challenges.