Scientists to explore the dark side of the sun

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Barb

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From Wired magazine:
Soon we may get the first ever glimpse of the dark side of the sun.

Well, no, there's no actual dark side of a luminous ball of burning gas, but there is an effective dark side, as in, the side of the sun we can't see at any given time.

Scientists aren't content to get just half of the picture, so they've launched the STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatories) mission, a pair of NASA spacecraft that will orbit the sun simultaneously to provide a complete view of all sides of the star at once.

"Then there will be no place to hide and we can see the entire sun for the first time," STEREO project scientist Michael Kaiser of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center told Wired.com.

The perfect spherical view will come on Feb. 6, 2011. Right now the satellites, which were launched in October 2006, are about 90 degrees apart, which allows a picture of about 270 degrees of the sun — the fullest view yet.

"The who goal of all of this is to try to get a better handle to try to predict solar storms, which cause cell phone disturbances, and disruptions to communications and power." Kaiser said. "We'd like to be able to predict these things as far in advance as possible to give us a longer warning time."

Solar storms are magnetic disruptions on the sun that release violent sprays of charged particles into space. These storms can produce magnificent displays of the Northern Lights. But some past storms have also cost airlines and satellite communications industries millions of dollars, and have led to large scale power blackouts (including one across the entire province of Quebec, Canada). Being able to reliably forecast these tempests in advance could make a huge difference in preventing disturbances on Earth.

Predicting solar weather is also important for the future of manned spaceflight. If astronauts are exposed to the intense radiation from solar storms while traveling beyond the protective magnetic field of the Earth, they could suffer serious harm. Even astronauts close to home who venture out for a spacewalk during a storm are put in danger.

"For future missions going to the moon and Mars, that's very important," Kaiser said. "Some of these solar storms can be very intense. If the astronauts were completely exposed to one of these storms the radiation could be high."

The STEREO mission also aims to improve our basic scientific understanding of the dynamics within the sun, which could shed light on the workings of stars in general.
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So are the satellites doing a flyby, or are they somehow being set up to orbit the sun on the far side from the Earth?
 
Awesome! <3 Maybe we can someday see what lies beyond this Solar System.
 
Maybe we may need to leave earth one day and go live somewhere else and this could help us with it
 
Hmm, this is pretty good, I love space and anything to do with it, wonder if the other side of sun is any different than the side we can see?

kiratwig said:
Maybe we may need to leave earth one day and go live somewhere else and this could help us with it
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Yeah, one day, but if we don't have a way to get to this place before it takes too long or we starve, get hurt and can't get help or the ship we are on runs out of resources before we get to the location, we will never get there. I think I saw on tv once that if you could get to the end of our galaxy, it would take a ship 30mins or one month (forget which) to get to the nearestgalaxy via a whromhole between the galaxies.

On the dark side, I read something in a book once that a man said he saw images of the dark side of the moon in his head or dreams (I forget which) so he drew them onto plates, and it was not till later did they find out the images he drew were what the dark side of the moon actually did look like.
 
My guess is that it looks exactly same on the back as it does in the front. Are they expecting to find humanoid alien creatures back there?
 
No, if you bothered to read the article, you'd know that their purpose is to study solar weather, which is important for manned spaceflight.
 
What would the solar weather be like up there? The sun has a lot of solar winds sometime. Maybe that's when it gets real chilly on the sun, but the sun itself is very hot and it heats up the Earth. That's what the sun is for and to also grow our food and plants that also need water. We actually wouldn't have Earth or other planets orbitting the sun if the sun didn't exist and we wouldn't be here without our most strongest source of energt which is the sun. I never heard of the dark side of the sun before. What's it like for them to be deep inside of it? My guess is it may be black.
 
The 'Dark Side' of the sun is only called so because it's an area we can't readily see. There's nothing really that special about it nor is it physically dark.

At its coolest points the sun only reaches a balmy 6,800 F. Brisk. The sun is 'hot' no matter where you are (Actually some of the hottest parts of the sun are in Corona, just above the surface, so there's no escaping the heat, even when not actually on the sun). The sun burns relatively brightly and evenly across its surface save for sunspots, and even still, they emit bits of light. Even on the inside, fusion reactions are constantly sparking off photons, so there's really nothing dark or cool about the sun.

Technically, we've already seen all the way around the sun. There's nothing new 'back' there since we've seen full rotations of it. This mission is supposed to allow us to see it and send back data at all points in Real Time for safety in outerspace manned missions and as an early warning system for magnetic storms as both Barb and the article pointed out.
 
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Rayne said:
The 'Dark Side' of the sun is only called so because it's an area we can't readily see. There's nothing really that special about it nor is it physically dark.

At its coolest points the sun only reaches a balmy 6,800 F. Brisk. The sun is 'hot' no matter where you are (Actually some of the hottest parts of the sun are in Corona, just above the surface, so there's no escaping the heat, even when not actually on the sun). The sun burns relatively brightly and evenly across its surface save for sunspots, and even still, they emit bits of light. Even on the inside, fusion reactions are constantly sparking off photons, so there's really nothing dark or cool about the sun.Technically, we've already seen all the way around the sun. There's nothing new 'back' there since we've seen full rotations of it. This mission is supposed to allow us to see it and send back data at all points in Real Time for safety in outerspace manned missions and as an early warning system for magnetic storms as both Barb and the article pointed out.
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I know. That's what I'm saying. The closer you are to the sun, the hotter it is or the hotter you are. Mercury is the planet closest to the sun so it's very hot there. And something about Venus's atmosphere being hot too. I haven't really looked at this in a while. The sun may look wide enough for exploration.

OK! I hope I didn't mess this up. I'm not good at keeping track of quotes whenever someone edits their posts after I reply.

Edit: If only I could add that final quote, the sun spins once every 25 days but we can't see it rotating all the time. They must be thinking of searching to explore the other side of the sun in the solar system rather than the sun itself.
 
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That didn't sound like what you were trying to say.
And the rest doesn't really have much bearing on the topic at hand.
 
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