 Mission/Goals
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Scientific Goals and Objectives |
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The primary goal of SDO is to understand the physics
of solar variations that influence life and society. It achieves that
goal by targeted basic research focused on determining how and why the
Sun varies, and on improving our understanding of how the Sun drives global
change and space weather. As one of the crucial instruments required to
meet this goal, the AIA focuses on the evolution of the magnetic environment
in the Sun’s atmosphere, and its interaction with embedded and surrounding
plasma. The science areas within the LWS program to which AIA contributes
directly are highlighted in the figure below. By its crucial contribution
to part of the mesh of linked science questions, AIA plays a key role
within the entire LWS program. The images of the corona taken by YOHKOH,
SOHO/EIT, and TRACE have shown that all coronal structures evolve in density,
temperature, and position on time scales as short as minutes. Conditions
within coronal loop volumes and open magnetic structures appear to depend
primarily on ’local’ conditions, i.e., on conditions determined by the
path of the field line, or loop, from end to end in the photosphere. This
sensitive dependence combined with the marked temporal evolutions of
the atmospheres contained within loops and open-field regions on relatively
short time scales, causes images to be dissimilar for different band passes,
even if their characteristic temperature intervals are rather small. Added
to the relatively Comments or Questions? Contact Atmospheric Imaging Assembly Project |