NASA’s STEREO Mission Sees the Entire Sun
Mark your calendars for February 2011 when, for the first time ever, the entire front and far side of the Sun will be simultaneously visible by the twin STEREO spacecraft. This momentous event when the two spacecraft attain 180 degrees of separation will be the culmination of years of planning and development. SESDA II staff’s ongoing support of instrument and data processing operations at the STEREO Science Center was vital in helping achieve this critical milestone.
SESDA II staff working at the GES DISC have developed a visualization tool named Giovanni (GES DISC Interactive Online Visualization ANd aNalysis Infrastructure). Giovanni provides data from several NASA satellites that allow monitoring of the atmospheric effects of the Merapi eruption. The 
For part of November, with the help of SESDA II’s High End Computing Network (HECN) staff, New Orleans is home to one of the fastest computer networks anywhere in the world. Called SCinet, the network is created each year exclusively for “SC”, the international conference for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis. This year’s conference, SC10 in New Orleans, is being attended by several members of the HECN group, including two SESDA staff members, who developed the cutting edge architecture, installed the complex system, and are demonstrating it to show its applicability to bandwidth-intensive applications that are typically found in the supercomputing and cloud computing worlds. Their year’s state-of-the-art network boasts capacity of over 260 gigabits per second – fast enough to allow the entire collection of books at the Library of Congress to be transferred in less than thirty seconds. Our HECN group’s contribution includes new technology that gives 40 gigabit per second disk-to-disk transfers and 100 gbps memory-to-memory transfers over transcontinental distances!
SESDA II staff working at the Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC) helped stand up the CO2 column-averaged dry air mole fraction data generated from measurements obtained by the Japanese Greenhouse gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT) platform. These data are Level 2 data generated by the Atmospheric CO2 Observations from Space (ACOS) Project at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
SESDA staff are supporting the international Group on Earth Observations (GEO) meeting in Bejing, China, in October. More than eighty countries will be represented. Presentations by the group include the Dynamic Planet exhibit. A poster developed for the US Health Showcase is shown in the figure.
SESDA II staff has set up a web-cam in the NASA/GSFC Building 29 clean room so that anybody can watch work being done on components of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in real-time. 
SESDA II scientists and media staff at the STEREO Science Center received a rare added bonus while processing video images of a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) obtained with one of the twin STEREO coronagraphs. The coronagraph’s occulting disk blocked out sufficient background light from the Sun’s gleaming outer atmosphere that Jupiter and four of its faint Galilean moons (first discovered by Galileo in 1610) could be discerned in the far distance. If you have the bandwidth, go to 
A study to be published in the 15 January 2010 issue of Fisheries Research describes characterization of an oceanic region in the southwest Atlantic Ocean, near the coast of southern Brazil, where juvenile blue sharks (Prionace glauca) are found in high numbers. One of the unusual aspects of the region is that mature blues are not found in the region. The research paper authored by Santiago Montealegre-Quijano and Carolus M. Vooren of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande (FURG) Instituto de Oceanografia, Laboratório de Elasmobrânquios e Aves Marinhas, utilized data from commercial fishing operations. The researchers determined that juvenile blue sharks stay in the region until they are about 1.3 meters in length. Then, the juvenile sharks disperse, with the young male sharks heading north, and the young female sharks heading south, south of the Subtropical Convergence Zone, waiting to head north until late austral summer. Sea surface temperatures from MODIS, analyzed with Giovanni, a data exploration analysis and visualization tool developed in part by a collaborative effort involving SESDA II scientists and engineers were used to characterize the location of the Subtropical Convergence Zone during the study period. These data helped to determine the location of the convergence zone during the periods when the fishing stations were observed. According to the authors, the Subtropical Convergence Zone occurred in the study area from late autumn into spring. The study describes possible migration routes of pregnant female blue sharks through the southwest Atlantic and how they return to the nursery zone to give birth to baby blue sharks.
SESDA II staff members planned and implemented the NASA booth at the Fall American Geophysical meeting in San Francisco. More than 10,000 people viewed booth exhibits and events, including the ‘Dynamic Planet’; an 81” video board showing continuous clips of NASA Science research and results; plus talks by prominent scientists. The SESDA team was led by Jennifer Brennan and Winnie Humberson.
