File:Solar Dynamics Observatory -Artist's Concept- (3797161573).jpg

English: The Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft, shown above the earth as it faces toward the Sun. (Artist concept.)

Credit: NASA CI Lab/Chris Meany

When NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) leaves Earth in November 2009 onboard an Atlas V rocket, the thunderous launch will trigger an avalanche.

Full story: www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sdo/news/avalanche.html

Mission planners are bracing themselves -- not for rocks or snow, but an avalanche of data.

"SDO will beam back 150 million bits of data per second, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week," says Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. That’s almost 50 times more science data than any other mission in NASA history. "It's like downloading 500,000 iTunes a day."

SDO is on a mission to study the sun in unprecedented detail. Onboard telescopes will scrutinize sunspots and solar flares using more pixels and colors than any other observatory in the history of solar physics. And SDO will reveal the sun’s hidden secrets in a prodigious rush of pictures.

"SDO is going to send us images ten times better than high definition television," says Pesnell, the project scientist for the new mission. A typical HDTV screen has 720 by 1280 pixels; SDO's images will have almost four times that number in the horizontal direction and five times in the vertical. “The pixel count is comparable to an IMAX movie -- an IMAX filled with the raging sun, 24 hours a da