Located in Palo Alto, California, LMSAL is involved in many ground- and space-based missions that study the Sun, with a sharp focus on basic research into understanding and predicting space weather and the behavior of the Sun, including its impacts on Earth and climate.
Enormous storms on the Sun driven by electromagnetic activity generate space weather that propagates outward across the Solar System and can cause severe disturbances of Earth's upper atmosphere and of the near-Earth space environment, with potential catastrophic impacts on ground- and space-based technological infrastructure.
In October 2011 the ATC co-sponsored a workshop entitled "Space Weather Risks and Society" that brought together a broad international spectrum of experts in solar and space weather, industry, economics, regulatory bodies, and emergency management to discuss the societal impacts of space weather, how to avoid or mitigate such impacts, and how to respond to them.
An understanding of space weather and – in particular – its impacts on society are in their infancy, but there is broad agreement that societal sensitivity to high-impact, low-frequency events is obviously substantial. Equally important is the need to thoroughly investigate how space weather impacts various components of our high-tech society, and identify the mechanisms by which it does so.
1985 – The Solar Optical Universal Polarimeter on STS-51FSpace Shuttle mission. Dr. Loren Acton of LMSAL served as a payload specialist/astronaut on the mission and operated the instrument during two weeks in space.
1991 – The Soft X-ray Telescope on the Japanese Yohkoh satellite
1995 – The Michelson Doppler Imager on the ESA/NASA SOHO
1998 – The solar telescope on NASA's Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE)
2006 – The extreme-ultraviolet imager instruments on NASA's twin Solar Terrestrial Relations (STEREO) spacecraft
2006, 2009, 2010 – The Solar X-ray Imagers SXIonGOES-N, -O and –P spacecraft
2006 – The focal-plane package on the Japanese Hinode (Solar-B) satellite
2010 – The atmospheric imaging assembly and the helioseismic and magnetic imager on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)
Two of the instruments for the next generation GOES-R satellites – the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) and the Solar Ultraviolet Imager (SUVI) – are currently under construction.
