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Solar storms: NatGeo reveals new work to predict space weather, protect vital systems
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Tonight's must-see TV: the National Geographic Channel focuses on new work to predict dangerous solar storms. Airing at 9 p.m. EST, this episode of Naked Science reveals how scientists are trying to model and predict the invisible storms that can knock out power grids and disrupt satellite communications.
Tracking space weather is a crucial part of today's hyper-connected life. NOAA points out that danger from solar events was first recorded at the very beginning of the modern communication age. Back in 1847 and 1859, solar flares knocked out telegraph systems in the U.S. and Europe.
Today's 2lst Century world depends on electrical power, satellite and wireless communications, and a host of services, like fuel pipelines, that are vulnerable to solar storm disruption. The costs of solar disruption, NOAA says:
However, it wasn’t until the HydroQuebec Power Grid blackout in Quebec, Canada, in March of 1989 that the world truly realized the extent to which solar storms can impact the economy. The solar storm induced a nine-hour blackout which affected 6 million customers and ultimately cost this power company more than $10 million — putting the cost of this disaster in the same category as hurricanes and earthquakes (and this does not include the estimated cost to its customers, which was in the tens — if not hundreds — of millions of dollars) .
Additionally, Public Service Electric and Gas in New Jersey suffered serious damage to two of its transformers. It cost PSE&G eight million to replace the transformers and the cost of replacement energy during the time the transformers were taken out of service was approximately $16.8 million, so the net cost for PSE&G was over $24 million. Together, this single space weather storm cost Hydro Quebec and PSE&G more than $30 million.
Also at risk: astronauts living and working in space. The Apollo 16 and 17 astronauts luckily were not on the moon when a savage solar storm erupted in August, 1972. Scientists estimate that the radiation from the storm would have killed them.
NASA studies the possible effects of radiation on spacewalking and space-living astronauts. With a permanent human presence aboard the International Space Station (ISS), it's more important than ever to understand solar storms and learn how to predict this dangerous space weather.
With human exploration of Mars among NASA's goals, the worries about solar storms and radiation have increased.
“It’s a question of radiation,” says Frank Cucinotta of NASA’s Space Radiation Health Project at the Johnson Space Center. “We know how much radiation is out there, waiting for us between Earth and Mars, but we’re not sure how the human body is going to react to it.”
NASA >astronauts have been in space, off and on, for 45 years. Except for a few quick trips to the moon, though, they’ve never spent much time far from Earth. Deep space is filled with x-rays and protons from flares, gamma rays from newborn black holes, and cosmic rays from exploding stars. A six-month trip to Mars, with no big planet nearby to block or deflect that radiation, is going to be a new adventure.
NASA weighs radiation danger in units of cancer risk. A healthy 40-year-old non-smoking American male stands a (whopping) 20% chance of eventually dying from cancer—if he stays on Earth. If he travels to Mars, the risk goes up.
The question is, how much?
Cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev says that early-era spacefarers already have been exposed to too much radiation. In December, I wrote about Lebedev's allegation that radiation in space years ago is now causing him to go blind:
He also charges that his government covered up the potential effects of radiation on orbit.Cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev, 66, spent 211 days aboard the Salyut-7 in 1982.
Now going blind from a sudden onset of fast-growing cataracts, Lebedeve said:
“I suffered from a lot of radiation in space. It was all concealed back then, during the Soviet years, but now I can say that I caused damage to my health because of that flight.."
“I burnt my eyes in space when I was working with the rocket equipment. There is no atmosphere in space so you’re getting a sunburn there like in a hot country. My eyes were aching after work a lot".
In December, 2008, NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) reported that NASA'S THEMIS satellites has scientists by discovering that sometimes the sun tears holes in Earth's protective magnetic field.
Earth’s magnetic field acts as a shield against the bombardment of particles continuously streaming from the sun. Because the solar particles (ions and electrons) are electrically charged, they feel magnetic forces and most are deflected by our planet's magnetic field.
However, our magnetic field is a leaky shield and the number of particles breaching this shield depends on the orientation of the sun’s magnetic field. It had been thought that when the sun’s magnetic field is aligned with that of the Earth, the door is shut and that few if any solar particles enter Earth’s magnetic shield. The door was thought to open up when the solar magnetic field direction points opposite to Earth’s field, leading to more solar particles inside the shield.
...Solar particles by themselves don't cause severe space weather, but they get energized when the solar magnetic field becomes oppositely-directed to Earth's and reconnects in a different way. The energized particles then cause magnetic storms that can overload power lines with excess current, causing widespread blackouts.
The particles also can cause radiation storms that present hazards to spacecraft in high orbits and astronauts passing through the storms on the way to the moon or other destinations in the solar system. "The more particles, the more severe the storm," said Joachim "Jimmy" Raeder of the University of New Hampshire, a co-author of Li's paper.
"If the solar field has been aligned with the Earth's for a while, we now know Earth's field is heavily loaded with solar particles and primed for a strong storm. This discovery gives us a basic predictive capability for the severity of solar storms, similar to a hurricane forecaster's realization that warmer oceans set the stage for more intense hurricanes.
In fact, we expect stronger storms in the upcoming solar cycle. The sun's magnetic field changes direction every cycle, and due to its new orientation in the upcoming cycle, we expect the clouds of particles ejected from the sun will have a field which is at first aligned with Earth, then becomes opposite as the cloud passes by."
NASA scientists recently predicted that a major solar storm, perhaps the worst in 50 years, is expected to erupt soon. The storm could hit as early as 2010, researchers said.
In 2007, NatGeo produced a show explaining the effects of solar storms and how NASA satellites were deployed to build models for space weather prediction. It's a good background for tonight's show.
Image credit: National Geographic Channel, NASA's SOHO satellite
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