SDO OFFICIALLY AN OBSERVATORY

Narration: Brent Robertson, SDO Observatory Manager

Transcript:
We had a big day planned for Solar Dynamics Observatory. We wanted to integrate our instrument module, which contains all of the instruments to a spacecraft bus, which contains all of the electronics we use to point the satellite and control the satellite. This was a big operation for us. It's a critical lift and a lot of preparation went into this operation. We have folks working on the spacecraft bus preparing it. We had folks working on the instrument module in preparation for the lift, and a lot of folks contributed to this overall effort. Here's a great shot of one of our telescopes, instrument telescopes. You see there are four large telescopes and adjacent to those telescopes are four smaller guide telescopes that we use to point the satellite to the sun. The instrument module was lifted off the Aronson table and slowly moved over to the spacecraft bus in preparation for the meeting. All eyes were on this operation and we had folks in place to make sure that we had no interference problems when we finally did the mating. It took a lot of people in the cleanroom to make this operation happen and, you know, we were all talking with each other making sure that everything went well. Anybody can stop this operation if they saw a problem, but things went well that day. You know, we've been working on this mission for about five years, so to get to this point where we have a finally integrated observatory was a great day for us.