Satellite News

Observations from NASA’s twin Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft have allowed U.S. Naval Research Laboratory scientists to see recent solar activity that may have produced the first casualty of the new solar cycle #24. A coronal mass ejection from 3 April 2010 apparently resulted in a critical failure on the Galaxy 15 communications satellite (a.k.a. Zombiesat).
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Although its peak is still four years away, a new active period of Earth-threatening solar storms will be the weakest since 1928, predicts an international panel of experts led by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center and funded by NASA. Despite the prediction, Earth is still vulnerable to a severe solar storm.

A NASA-funded study describes how extreme solar eruptions could have severe consequences for communications, power grids and other technology on Earth.

Sometime between the end of 2008 and the beginning 2009, NASA will launch the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) to examine how the Sun builds up and explosively releases magnetic energy, which powers severe space weather.

Observations of solar flares by spacecraft at Mars, Venus and the Earth show that eruptions on the far side of the Sun may affect space weather back on Earth.

Settling a longstanding scientific debate, Los Alamos scientists have demonstrated conclusively how electromagnetic waves accelerate ordinary electrons in the belts of radiation outside Earth’s atmosphere to a state where they become “killer electrons,” particles that are hazardous to satellites, spacecraft, and astronauts.
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Coronal Mass Ejection (CMEs) with powerful shocks capable of causing radiation storms “scream” in radio waves as they slam through the solar wind, according to Dr. Natchimuthuk Gopalswamy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Research by Dr. Arik Posner, a research scientist at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), has led to a new method for forecasting the appearance and intensity of solar ion events by measuring relativistic, near light-speed electrons.