 The National Center for Atmospheric Research has a laboratory that studies the sun. Like all stars, our sun gets its power from nuclear fusion in the core. It converts hydrogen to helium, and all stars get their power that way. But the sun is also a magnet. So when you look at the sun in white light, you can sometimes see dark areas on the surface. Those are sunspots, and their region is a very intense magnetic field. The field is so strong that it's blocking the heat coming from below. So it makes the region cooler, and that's why they appear dark. The outer atmosphere of the sun is known as the corona. It's extremely hot. It has a temperature of over a million degrees Kelvin. And that's compared to the surface of the sun that has a temperature of about 5,800 degrees. And we're really interested in the corona, since most solar activity takes place in the corona. Most of the energy in the corona resides in the sun's magnetic field. It works with gravity to hold down the extremely hot gas that is the corona, which wants to expand outward. Now sometimes the magnetic field fails, and the gas explodes out into the solar system in what's called a coronal mass ejection, or CME. These clouds of hot gas and magnetic field can travel through space and hit the earth. They can transfer a lot of their energy to the earth's magnetic field, causing beautiful auroras, but they can also damage satellites, endanger astronauts, disrupt GPS, communication, and power grids. So the solar magnetic field really matters, because it's what powers solar activity, and its direction when it gets near the earth is what's going to determine whether or not the storms here are really big. We have to study the corona as well as make good high quality observations of the sun, and we want to be at very high altitudes with dry conditions to get the best observations. The summit of Mauna Loa in Hawaii is just right. Built in 1965, the Mauna Loa Solar Observatory is situated on a lava field at 11,200 feet. We're really proud of the new instruments that we have at Mauna Loa and the advances they're helping us to make, and we share all of our observations with the world from the Mauna Loa website. Next you're going to hear from Alice Leshinsky about a new exciting instrument that's going in on another volcano in Hawaii at Haleakala. We are helping to build another instrument, de-kissed. It stands for the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, and it's named after a longtime senator from Hawaii who is so helpful at supporting the scientists and getting support for this instrument. The telescope will study the magnetic field of the sun in exquisite detail, and it's going to do it from the summit of Haleakala, which is aptly named House of the Sun. This telescope is big, really big. The mirror is four meters, that's 13 feet. It's the biggest solar telescope in history. NCAR's High Altitude Observatory is creating an instrument for de-kissed called the VISP, or Visual Spectra Polarimeter. It's going to look at the spectra of the sun, which is the different wavelengths. This spectra gives us incredibly detailed information about the sun's magnetic field, and this will be able to simultaneously measure those fields at three different heights simultaneously, and that's the important thing. This, with greater understanding, we really hope to predict and then be able to protect our satellites, astronauts, and our electrical power grids. That's a lot of really hot science right now.