NASA is sending a new mission in the space to observe the surface of the sun so as to unlock the secret of solar storms and other chaotic activities.  The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), scheduled to be launched Feb 9, will spend five years in the space to observe how sunlight is generated. It will try to trace causes of extreme solar activities, such as sun spots, solar winds and flares.

By understanding how such solar phenomena are created, they hope to be able to produce reliable forecasts of "space weather" and provide advance warnings of any threat, The Sunday Times reported. Orbiting the earth at a distance of 22,300 miles, the observatory will measure fluctuations in the sun's ultraviolet output, map magnetic fields and photograph its surface.

The "giant microscope" mission, will capture for the first time every nuance of the sun's exterior. The images relayed to earth will be 10 times clearer than high-definition television, experts claims.

"It is Nasa's first weather mission and it aims to characterise everything on the sun that can impact on the earth and near earth, said Barbara Thompson, project scientist.

"We know things happen on the sun which affect spacecraft, communications and radio signals. If we can understand the underlying causes of what is happening then we can turn this information into forecasts," Thomson said.

NASA estimates that the SDO will transmit as much as 50 times more scientific data than any other mission in the space agency's history. The agency has set up a pair of dedicated radio antennae near Las Cruces, New Mexico to process the data.

The UK-based Science and Technology Facilities Council is supplying some of the equipment for the observatory. Understanding the impact of the sun's magnetic fields was key to the mission, Professor Richard Harrison of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire said.

"The idea is to image different layers of the sun's atmosphere all the way down to the surface and measure magnetic fields," he said. "The bottom line is that you are trying to understand how this atmosphere works. We can already see phenomena like the flares. The question is how does the magnetic field form to allow this sort of thing to happen."