EVE MEGS-A and SAM have been Turned Off

[Marcel de Bont]

The SpaceWeatherLive team is sad to announce to our visitors that the SAM pinhole camera on board the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory suffered a failure in the CCD electronics and will be out of order. The EVE team is looking at ways to start them again, but they do not have a date for restarting the instruments.

SpaceWeatherLive uses the imagery from this camera to detect solar flares. The image that the pinhole camera produces can be found on the site under the ''Solar flares'' section. Another feature from the SAM pinhole camera was that it is able to pinpoint the location of solar flares with great accuracy. We used this feature to automatically assign a solar flare to a specific region and this was then posted on our site, on our Twitter account and over email. Unfortunately this feature can not be used anymore without the EVE SAM instrument and thus we can not automatically assign solar flares anymore to a specific region.

Below you can read an official statement from the SDO team:

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EVE MEGS-A and SAM have been Turned Off

I am very sad to say that SDO has decided to turn off EVE MEGS-A and EVE SAM. The EVE MEGS-A/SAM instrument has had a failure in the CCD electronics. The EVE team is looking at ways to start them again, but we do not have a date for restarting the instruments.
The discovery of late-phase flares depended on the linking of MEGS-A spectra and AIA images. The SAM images were made by a pinhole camera, but had a remarkable accuracy in determining the location of flares.

MEGS-B, MEGS-P, and ESP are working as designed.

This letter from Tom Woods, the EVE PI, was sent out yesterday.

Hi EVE team,

We're sad to report that EVE MEGS-A / SAM data stream has ended on Monday May 26, 2014 due to a power anomaly for MEGS-A CCD electronics. With the SAM images being from MEGS-A CCD, both SAM solar X-ray images and MEGS-A spectra (6-37 nm) are not available now. The MEGS-A and SAM data from May 1, 2010 to May 26, 2014 will remain available from the EVE web site (http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/eve/).

All the other EVE instruments are working well, ESP, MEGS-B, and MEGS-P. We'll be working with the EVE science team to optimize the EVE observations with those instruments.

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The attached image shows the strongest solar flare captured by the EVE SAM instrument. The X6.9 solar flare from August 8, 2011. We will greatly miss the EVE SAM instrument and wish the EVE team good luck in trying to restore the instrument.

 

http://www.spaceweatherlive.com/community/uploads/monthly_05_2014/post-94-0-30258600-1401393068.pnghttp://www.spaceweatherlive.com/community/uploads/monthly_05_2014/post-94-0-91128700-1401393163.jpg

[Guest Harry Twinotter]

:-(