ULA sends CU, Lockheed Martin instruments into orbit

Denver Business Journal - by Greg Avery
 
An Atlas V from Centennial-based United Launch Alliance blasted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida Thursday morning and released the Solar Dynamics Observatory into orbit 21,000 miles above the Earth’s surface. The launch was the first by ULA in 2010.

NASA’s SDO satellite will study space weather and storms on the Sun in the hope of better understanding how those phenomena affect communications infrastructure, navigation systems and electrical grids, and what that solar weather means on Earth for people in planes and astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

The satellite is considered the most powerful ever to study the Sun. It’s designed to send more than a terabyte of data about the Sun to researchers daily.

The SDO includes a $32 million instrument package designed and built by University of Colorado at Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics instrument package set for launch Feb. 10 by NASA should help scientists better understand the violent effects of the sun on near-Earth space weather that can affect satellites, power grids, ground communications systems and even astronauts and aircraft crews.

Other instruments on the satellite will examine the beneath Sun’s surface and look at its magnetic fields. Both those instruments were built by the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, Calif., which is part of the research arm of Littleton-based Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co.

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