The first images of the sun beamed home from NASA's newest solar observatory have wowed mission scientists with their extraordinary detail and unexpected findings.
NASA released the first new images of our closest star today from the Solar Dynamics Observatory, a probe launched on Feb. 11 to peer deep into the layers of the sun, monitor solar storms and investigate the mysteries of the sun's inner workings.
"The spacecraft and the instruments are working very well," said Richard Fisher, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. "What we've seen is truly, in my view, spectacular."
The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) carries three instruments that constantly stare at the sun, generating images that have a resolution 10 times better than an HD television.
"I believe this is going to be a revolutionary view" of the sun, Fisher told SPACE.com, who likened the new observatory's impact to that of the Hubble Space Telescope.
SDO will be revolutionary to the study of the sun "in the same way Hubble was revolutionary for astrophysics," he said.
The young solar observatory will also be generating an astounding amount of data.
It will stream the equivalent of half-a-million songs per day down to a ground station from its geosynchronous orbit. That's about 150 million bits of data per second, 24 hours a day and seven days a week — almost 50 times more science data than any other mission in NASA's history.
The simultaneous monitoring of several wavelengths of the sun's light coupled with the more rapid pace of observations will give scientists an unprecedentedly detailed view of the features present on the sun. It will also help monitor the solar flares and storms that can impact Earth, as well as shed light on the influence of the sun's magnetic field on the processes that take place within the sun.
Already observations of solar features and their evolution is showing that "the magnetic field is really much more dominant than we thought," Fisher said.
And though the spacecraft is still in its commissioning phase — meaning all of the instruments are being properly calibrated and the probe is entering its final orbit — it has taken images that are already making unexpected revelations.
One particularly interesting observation, Fisher said, shows the evolution of an active region of the sun, also known as a sunspot. The dark spots on the sun's surface are connected to intense magnetic activity. SDO caught this sunspot in decline that didn't look quite how scientists expected it to.
"It's a little bit baffling about what happened," Fisher said.
SDO observed that tiny changes in the magnetic field due to the decline of the sunspot "have a huge impact on the upper solar atmosphere," Fisher said, likening that to a situation on Earth where a lightning bolt in Indiana would cause a hurricane on the East Coast.
That SDO is already stumping scientists with its findings even though it's not yet in full observing mode (which will happen sometime next month) shows what a useful spacecraft it is, Fisher said.
"The hallmark of a successful science experiment [is] that you don't understand what you've gotten back," he said.
SPACE.com -- 'Spectacular' First Images from New Solar Observatory Released
