The burgeoning space industry and the technologies society increasingly relies on – electric grids, aviation and telecommunications – are all vulnerable to the same threat: space weather.
Space weather encompasses any variations in the space environment between the Sun and Earth. One common type of space weather event is called an interplanetary coronal mass ejection.
These ejections are bundles of magnetic fields and particles that originate from the Sun. They can travel at speeds up to 1,242 miles per second (2,000 kilometers per second) and may cause geomagnetic storms.
They create beautiful aurora displays – like the northern lights you can sometimes see in the skies – but can also disrupt satellite operations, shut down the electric grid and expose astronauts aboard future crewed missions to the Moon and Mars to lethal doses of radiation.
An animation shows coronal mass ejection erupting from the Sun.
I’m a heliophysicist and space weather expert, and my team is leading the development of a next-generation satellite constellation called SWIFT, which is designed to predict potentially dangerous space weather events in advance. Our goal is to forecast extreme space weather more accurately and earlier.
The dangers of space weather
Commercial interests now make up a big part of space exploration, focusing on space tourism, building satellite networks, and working toward extracting resources from the Moon and nearby asteroids.
Space is also a critical domain for military operations. Satellites provide essential capabilities for military communication, surveillance, navigation and intelligence.
As countries such as the U.S. grow to depend on infrastructure in space, extreme space weather events pose a greater threat. Today, space weather threatens up to US$2.7 trillion in assets globally.
In September 1859, the most powerful recorded space weather event, known as the Carrington event, caused fires in North America and Europe by supercharging telegraph lines. In August 1972, another Carrington-like event nearly struck the astronauts orbiting the Moon. The radiation dose could have been fatal. More recently, in February 2022, SpaceX lost 39 of its 49 newly launched Starlink satellites because of a moderate space weather event.
Today’s space weather monitors
Space weather services heavily rely on satellites that monitor the solar wind, which is made up of magnetic field lines and particles coming from the Sun, and communicate their observations back to Earth. Scientists can then compare those observations with historical records to predict space weather and explore how the Earth may respond to the observed changes in the solar wind.
The Earth’s magnetic field acts as a shield that deflects most solar wind.
NASA via Wikimedia Commons
Earth’s magnetic field naturally protects living things and…
