NASA's SDO ready for launch
And coming out to play with your satellite navigation, and possibly satcoms, too, so the launch of the Solar Dynamics Observatory scheduled for today is timely.
After years of such quiescence since the Sun’s last maximum activity in 1985 that some astronomers muttered about a new Maunder Minimum*, the sun has suddenly woken up. Within the next few years we’ll be licked by solar flares and a variety of phenomenae that will reach out and touch the constellations of satellites on which we now depend and nobody really knows what’s going to happen.