The Solar Dynamics Observatory

This volume is dedicated to the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which was launched 11 February 2010. The articles focus on the spacecraft and its instruments: the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA), the Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment (EVE), and the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI). Articles within also describe calibration results and data processing pipelines that are critical to understanding the data and products, concluding with a description of the successful Education and Public Outreach activities. This book is geared towards anyone interested in using the unprecedented data from SDO, whether for fundamental heliophysics research, space weather modeling and forecasting, or educational purposes. Previously published in Solar Physics journal, Vol. 275/1-2, 2012. Selected articles in this book are published open access under a CC BY-NC 2.5 license at link.springer.com. For further details, please see the license information in the chapters.

Table of contents

The Solar System is a complex and fascinating dynamical system. This is the first textbook to describe comprehensively the dynamical features of the Solar System and to provide students with all the mathematical tools and physical models they need to understand how it works. It is a benchmark publication in the field of planetary dynamics and destined to become a classic. Clearly written and well illustrated, Solar System Dynamics shows how a basic knowledge of the two- and three-body problems and perturbation theory can be combined to understand features as diverse as the tidal heating of Jupiter's moon Io, the origin of the Kirkwood gaps in the asteroid belt, and the radial structure of Saturn's rings. Problems at the end of each chapter and a free Internet Mathematica® software package are provided. Solar System Dynamics provides an authoritative textbook for courses on planetary dynamics and celestial mechanics. It also equips students with the mathematical tools to tackle broader courses on dynamics, dynamical systems, applications of chaos theory and non-linear dynamics.

In 2010, NASA and the National Science Foundation asked the National Research Council to assemble a committee of experts to develop an integrated national strategy that would guide agency investments in solar and space physics for the years 2013-2022. That strategy, the result of nearly 2 years of effort by the survey committee, which worked with more than 100 scientists and engineers on eight supporting study panels, is presented in the 2013 publication, Solar and Space Physics: A Science for a Technological Society. This booklet, designed to be accessible to a broader audience of policymakers and the interested public, summarizes the content of that report.

SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA to study the Sun, from its deep core to the outer corona, and the solar wind. To achieve its scientific goals it carries a complement of twelve sophisticated, state-of-the-art instruments. Three helioseismology instruments are expected to provide unique data for the study of the structure and dynamics of the solar interior, from the very deep core to the outermost layers of the convection zone. A set of five complementary remote sensing instruments, consisting of EUV and UV imagers, spectrographs and coronagraphs, will give us our first comprehensive view of the outer solar atmosphere and corona, leading to a better understanding of the enigmatic coronal heating and solar wind acceleration processes. Finally, three experiments will complement the remote sensing observations by making in-situ measurements of the composition and energy of the solar wind and charged energetic particles. This volume contains detailed descriptions of all the twelve instruments on board SOHO. Also included are an overview paper and a description of the SOHO ground system, science operations and data products. The aim of these papers is to make the broader scientific community, and in particular potential guest investigators, aware of the scientific objectives and capabilities of the SOHO payload and to provide a reference document for the various instruments.