Turning all the railway signals red, disrupting power grids and telephone lines, disabling the GPS services and radio transmissions and damaging the satellite solar arrays. There are many tricks the geomagnetic storms caused by powerful solar Coronal Mass Ejections can pull. The seminar held at The Institution of Engineering and Technology in London on September 28 aimed at bringing together [...]
Post Tagged with: “solar storm”
Radioactive Decay Predicts Solar Storms
With increasing orbital assets as well as dependecy on earthly electronics, humanity’s exposure to solar storm disruption is ever increasing. Scientists at Purdue and Ohio State Universities may have discovered a method to predict such storms hours before a solar flare even occurs. “We have repeatedly seen a precursor signal preceding a solar flare,” said Ephraim Fischbach, a Purdue University [...]
Scientists Measure Coronal Loop Plasma Speeds
An international team of scientists has observed the movement of gases at one million degrees Kelvin in a coronal loop. These new observations were made from the Hinode satellite, formerly Solar-B, a joint ESA, NASA, JAXA and UK satellite launched in 2006. “Active regions are now occurring frequently across the Sun,” said Dr. Helen Mason from the University of Cambridge’s Department [...]
Geomagnetic Storm Alert Issued
There is a high probability of a moderate geomagnetic storm hitting Earth over May 9th through 10th in the wake of two coronal mass ejections (CME) and a coronal hole spewing solar wind in the planet’s direction. The two CMEs erupted from the Sun on May 7, from a sunspot region that is so large it is visible without aid of [...]
Solar Storm Energy Could Have Powered New York for Two Years
Super-heated particles from the March 8th-10th solar storm produced an estimate 26 billion kilowatt-hours of energy. An X-class solar flare caused the Earth-directed solar storm Staff WritersMore Posts
The Sound of a Solar Storm
Using NASA’s Messenger and Solar and Heliospheric Observatory spacecraft, doctoral design student Robert Alexander “sonifed” data from a March solar storm. Alexander is a composer at the University of Michigan with a NASA fellowship to study how auditory data representation can further scientific analysis. ”We’re used to looking at wiggly-line plots and graphs, but humans are very good at hearing things,” commented University [...]
Commercial Airliners, Electrical Grids Weathering the Solar Storm
Despite warnings that Tuesday’s massive solar flares and associated coronal mass ejection (CME) might cause disruptions to power systems on Earth, there were almost no reported effects as the CME flew past. The two X-class solar flares, part of the largest solar storm since 2005, were predicted to cause a geomagnetic storm of between class G2 and G3 (G5 being the [...]
Solar Storms Pass Harmlessly
From February 23 to February 24, five solar storms released high energy particles out into the solar system. Two of the storms released coronal mass ejections in the direction of Earth. By February 26, all danger of geomagnetic fall-out was past with only some heightened aurorae as proof of the storms’ passing. The video below, courtesy of NASA, shows a close-up of the magnetic solar [...]
Efforts to Revive South African SumbandilaSat Abandoned
SumbandilaSat, a South African Earth observation microsatellite, ceased to function due to damage it sustained during a solar storm in June 2010. During the storm, the power supply to the satellite’s onboard computer failed, and consequently, the satellite stopped transmitting images to the ground. The satellite’s developer, SunSpace, has abandoned efforts to revive the 100 million USD satellite, and has announced [...]
Strongest Solar Storm of 2012 in Decline
On January 27, the sun released an X class coronal mass ejection (CME) from sunspot 1402, the same sunspot responsible for January 21′s M class CME. Although the latest flare caused an intial radio blackout on January 27, radiation levels have now declined to S2 (moderate) levels and no further interference is expected, according to NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. “It’s [...]
