Solar Data Analysis Center

The Solar Data Analysis Center serves data from recent and current space-based solar-physics missions, funds and hosts much of the SolarSoft library, and leads the Virtual Solar Observatory (VSO) effort.

When the Solar Maximim Mission (SMM) was interrupted in late 1980, the SMM Principal Investigator teams, with NASA approval, voted to use some of the unused mission operation funds to establish a joint SMM Data Analysis Center. By the next decade, the SMMDAC was chosen to be the US repository for data from the Yohkoh mission, and a name change was in order: the Solar Data Analysis Center, or SDAC. The SolarSoft library grew out of a desire to extend the usefulness of the Yohkoh software to the SOHO mission. Following the Senior Review of Sun-Earth Connections missions and data centers, SDAC was directed to proceed with development of the Virtual Solar Observatory (VSO). The SDAC is also the host for the STEREO Science Center.

"The aeronautical and space activities of the United States shall be conducted so as to contribute... to the expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space. The Administration shall provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities and the results thereof."

-- National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958

But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

Full Speech

You can read the full text here: http://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/ricetalk.htm