It's hard enough to build one spacecraft, but the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMS) is building four. Together, the spacecraft will unlock the mysteries of magnetic reconnection, when magnetic fields explosively connect and...

Little SDO explains both how he can see inside the sun and how he can tell what you ate for lunch today.

On August 1, 2008 a rare total solar eclipse will appear in the skies over parts of Canada, Greenland, Russia, Mongolia, and China. During this spectacular event, the moon will cross in front of the sun, completely blocking out the sun's...

A magnetic filament of solar material erupted on the sun in late September, breaking the quiet conditions in a spectacular fashion. The 200,000 mile long filament ripped through the sun's atmosphere, the corona, leaving behind what looks...

For the first time, scientists have ground and satellite views of STEVE (short for Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement), a thin purple ribbon of light. Scientists have now learned, despite its ordinary name, that STEVE may be an...

Music: Stella Maris courtesy of Moby Gratis. The sun is always changing and NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory is always watching. Launched on Feb. 11, 2010, SDO keeps a 24-hour eye on the entire disk of the sun, with a prime view of the...

Sun-Earth Day is comprised of a series of programs and events that occur throughout the year culminating with a celebration on or near the Spring Equinox. For Sun-Earth Day 2009, NASA will engage a worldwide audience in the celebration...

Launched on Feb. 11, 2010, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is the most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the sun. During its five-year mission, it will examine the sun's atmosphere, magnetic field and also provide a...

This video takes SDO images and applies additional processing to enhance the structures visible. While there is no scientific value to this processing, it does result in a beautiful, new way of looking at the sun. The original frames are...

A bright comet fell into the sun on October 2, 2011 in synch with a coronal mass ejection bursting out on the other side. Credit: ESA/NASA/LASCO C2

After several days of continued observations, scientists continue to work to determine and to understand the fate of Comet ISON: There's no doubt that the comet shrank in size considerably as it rounded the sun and there's no doubt that...

An X1.4 class flare erupted from the center of the sun, peaking on July 12, 2012 at 12:52 PM EDT. It erupted from Active Region 1520 which rotated into view on July 6. This video uses SDO AIA footage in 131(teal), 171(gold) and 335...

NASA's Parker Solar Probe is in the midst of intense environmental testing at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in preparation for its journey to the Sun. These tests simulate the noise and shaking the spacecraft...

The sun emitted a trio of mid-level solar flares on April 2-3, 2017. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the sun constantly, captured images of the three events. Music credit: A Waltz into Darkness by Joseph Bennie Credit:...

A team of three scientists have two minutes to complete an experiment during the 2017 total solar eclipse. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Genna Duberstein Music credit: Patisserie Pressure by Benjamin James Parsons

Part II of The Scientific Revolution explores the latter half of this movement and the gradual acceptance of scientific truth. This fascinating period of history chronicles European society's emergence from church domination that...

This video explains how telescopes can act as time machines, allowing us to see objects in space as they appeared millions of years ago. By measuring distances in light years and understanding the speed of light, scientists can observe...

On August 9, 2011 beginning at 3:48 AM EDT, the sun emitted an Earth-directed X6.9 flare, as measured by the NOAA GOES satellite. These gigantic bursts of radiation cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to harm humans on the ground,...

Over a six-hour period on April 21, 2015, NASA's Solar Dyanmics Observatory (SDO) observed a wing-like prominence eruption. SDO views the sun in various wavelengths of the extreme ultravoilet, including 171 (shown in gold) and 304 (shown...

This compilation of video shows some of the first imagery and data sent back from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Most of the imagery comes from SDO's AIA instrument, and different colors are used to represent different...

On May 12-13 the sun erupted with an X1.7-class and an X2.8-class flare as well as two coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, off the upper left side of the sun. Solar material also danced and blew off the sun in what's called a prominence...

Eruptive events on the sun can be wildly different. Some come just with a solar flare, some with an additional ejection of solar material called a coronal mass ejection (CME), and some with complex moving structures in association with...

NASA is getting ready to launch a new mission, a mission to observe a largely unexplored region of the solar atmosphere that powers its dynamic million-degree outer atmosphere and drives the solar wind. In late June 2013, the Interface...

Little SDO demonstrates the fact that he takes really, really large pictures of the sun. Or get tweeted by NASA: