NASA's newest probe to study the Sun was launched on Thursday, February 11, 2010, after the winds subsided and the weather cleared over the Florida launch pad at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.





The Solar Dynamics Observatory ( SDO ) lifted off from Launch Complex 41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.Its 'first-of-a-kind' mission will be ''¦ to reveal the sun's inner workings in unprecedented detail.' [NASA]The launch, which happened at the beginning of its one-hour launch window, occurred at 10:23 a.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST), 1523 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).The launch was scrubbed on Wednesday, February 10th, when winds were too high for mission launch requirements. Check out the iTWire article " NASA scrubs SDO solar probe because of wind gusts " for additional details.In addition, a YouTube video of the launch appears at ' SDO Launch .'An Atlas 5 rocket lifted up the SDO payload into space, from its launch pad at Cape Canaveral.The goals of the SDO mission is to learn more about the Sun, especially with regards to its magnetic field and its variable and often times violent solar weather patterns that impinge on our daily lives here on Earth.The slightly-longer-than-five-year mission will send back a bunch of data from its very high, circular geosynchronous orbit of about 36,000 kilometers, with a longitude of 102 degrees West and an inclination of 28.5 degrees.Page two continues with a "bit" more information on the NASA SDO mission.NASA states that SDO will return about 150 million bits of data each second to Earth for analysis by scientists.In fact, NASA is quoted in the article ' NASA Successfully Launches a New Eye on the Sun ': 'The most technologically advanced of NASA's heliophysics spacecraft, SDO will take images of the sun every 0.75 seconds and daily send back about 1.5 terabytes of data to Earth -- the equivalent of streaming 380 full-length movies."Richard R. Fisher, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA, stated, "This is going to be sensational. SDO is going to make a huge step forward in our understanding of the sun and its effects on life and society." [NASA]For additional information on the SDO mission, please read the 2.6.2010 iTWire article ' Get up close and personal with our variable star: the Sun .'