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The newest satellite creation to study the sun was created and built in Greenbelt and will continue to be controlled from NASA-Goddard for the next five years.

At nearly 15 feet tall and 6,800 lbs., the Solar Dynamics Observatory is en route to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It is scheduled to launch in November 2009 to investigate the causes of solar unpredictability and its influence on Earth.

The SDO is NASA's first mission to be launched under the "Living With a Star Program," which is housed at NASA-Goddard, and was designed to understand the sun's changes and how they affect life in the solar system. The SDO will study how the magnetic field is generated and structures.

"The satellite will take pictures of the sun so we can understand where the magnetic energy is converted into things like solar wind," said SDO Project Scientist William Dean Pesnell of Arnold. Solar weather causes damage to satellites, which impacts communication and navigation equipment. It can also be harmful to astronauts.

The $850 million SDO satellite is equipped with a Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager, Atmospheric Imaging Assembly and Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment. The HMI measures sound waves inside the sun, similar to an ultrasound, The AIA takes high resolution pictures of the sun's different layers and the EVE will measure the sun's brightness.

"We want to understand what happens when the sun gets brighter, because when the sun gets brighter, satellites fall down," Pesnell said.

The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, which is still being controlled from NASA-Goddard, was launched in 1995 to study the sun's core, outer corona and solar wind, but it can only produce images every 12 minutes, whereas the SDO will produce images every 10 seconds.

For five years, SDO will take ultra high-definition measurements and images of the sun, ultimately collecting 1.5 terabytes of data per day. That's equivalent to downloading 500,000 songs from iTunes per day, Pesnell said.

Before being sent to the Kennedy Space Center, each piece of the satellite is tested numerous times, said Brent Robertson, SDO observatory manager. Each part is put through vibration, acoustic and environmental testing and is tested again once it has been placed on the satellite.

Once the satellite has launched, which is scheduled in November, it will take about 60 days before any images are captured, Pesnell said.

"The SDO is going to increase our understanding of how the sun works, and nobody has ever done that before, so everybody gets behind that," Robertson said.