From today’s SDO blog entry:

Today, starting at 1315 UTC (8:15 am ET), SDO will execute the EVE Field of View maneuver followed by the HMI/AIA Flatfield at 1630 UTC (11:30 am ET). During these maneuvers the science data will be interrupted. These maneuvers and last weeks’ Delta-H thruster firing were flipped in the schedule published earlier.

Instruments can degrade in the harsh environment of space, and so it is important to calibrate at regular intervals to make sure that we have the best data available at all times. SDO therefore occasionally makes special maneuvers that enable the measurements to be made that can be used to help calibrate the instruments onboard. Whilst these maneuvers are going on, some of the AIA and SDO images may look unusual.

SDO has three instruments onboard: AIA, HMI and the Extreme Ultraviolet Experiment, EVE. The EVE instrument is designed to measure the solar extreme ultraviolet (EUV) irradiance. The EUV radiation includes the 0.1-105 nm range, which provides the majority of the energy for heating Earth’s thermosphere and creating Earth’s ionosphere (charged plasma). The majority of EVE data are time-series of measurements of the spectral content of solar extreme ultraviolet irradiance, although some low spatial resolution x-ray images are also taken by the EVE Solar Aspect Monitor (SAM) instrument (see the example below). EVE gives us lots of information on the spectral content of the Sun’s radiation changes with time, which is very important for understanding the Earth-Sun connection.