The Nasa probe keeping tabs on our turbulent Sun

Brett Sapper has the unique responsibility of controlling Nasa's eye on the Sun.

From a modest office in the agency's Goddard Space Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland, Sapper is in charge of the day-to-day operations of the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a satellite equipped with high-speed cameras capable of registering the Sun's activity nearly without interruptions.

Launched in 2010 from Cape Canaveral, SDO has already been able to beam back 140 million images of the Sun, and some estimates predict that it will end up transmitting as much as 50 times more scientific information than any other mission in Nasa's history.

Researchers hope this massive amount of data will help them forecast the effects of our turbulent star's behaviour on Earth. Intense solar activity can knock out power grids, GPS navigations and radio communications.

From SDO's mission operation centre and surrounded by computers showing event logs and colourful displays of the satellite, Sapper says his work is fascinating because he is able to control "a robot in space" that he can't see and is located 36,500km (22,600 miles) above the Earth.

But he immediately adds a caveat: "We are like fire fighters. We want to be bored, because if it's exciting it means there's a big problem."

Up to now, according to this electrical engineer, there have not been any moments of fear, and he has been able to swiftly work with eight other scientists to control the mission's daily operations.

They send commands and instructions to the satellite to tell it where to move, get all the "housekeeping information" back and also control two satellite dishes located at the White Sands Facility, in New Mexico, that are entirely dedicated to tracking the SDO while it collects scientific information.

"We do all that from here instead of having to call someone and have him do it for us", says Sapper. "That's something new here at Goddard and we are the only mission that does that: control the ground station from the mission operation centre".

The satellite has got three instruments used by scientists to analyse not only the stellar surface, but also the star's interior. The possibility of looking inside the Sun is of vital importance to heliophysicists as they aim to decipher the very source of solar activity - the solar dynamo. This refers to the plasma currents that generate the Sun's unpredictable magnetic field.

Scientists are now able to peer into the Sun by analysing the star's own acoustic waves, which are generated by its boiling turbulence. Using one of SDO's instruments, researchers are capable of turning those waves into clear pictures of the Sun's inner structures, just as geologists analyse the Earth's interior by studying earthquakes.

Of course, Sapper and his colleagues at the mission operation centre cannot do all that work by themselves. In Goddard, his team only controls the technical aspects of the satellite and the antennas, whereas the science is done mainly by laboratories and universities across the country.

One of Brett Sapper's colleagues at Goddard is helioseismologist William Dean Pesnell, whose job consists of interacting with the science groups. In other words, Pesnell is responsible for transforming Sapper's technical work into concrete results that may shed light on the solar dynamics that have an impact on the Earth's environment.

"We look at our satellite 24 hours a day and we get the data very quickly, so we can use it for immediate space weather purposes," says Dr Pesnell.

This is important because the Sun's unpredictable behaviour could wreak havoc on the Earth: Nasa cites a 2008 report by the National Academy of Sciences, according to which a century-class solar storm could cause 20 times more economic damage than hurricane Katrina, considered the costliest US hurricane on record.

It is therefore relevant for Dr Pesnell and his scientific team to try to understand what the Sun will do next.

"The goal of all our research is to predict what the magnetic field is going to do," he says.

"We aim to tell people: 'a flare is going to happen and if that is a concern to you, you should take steps to protect yourself'."

But in order to accomplish their goal, both Sapper and Pesnell still have a lot of work ahead of them. SDO set out on a five-year mission, but mission scientists hope Nasa will extend the spacecraft's life by a few more years after 2015.

After all, they know that a priceless treasure is at stake: the desire to understand the behaviour of our explosive star.