Space Weather Forecasters Can Count on Jupiter

Abhishek writes "Space.com reports that forecasters who predict the Solar weather can rely on Jupiter now to help them see the part of the sun that is not visible due to Earth's rotation and revolution and sun's rotation along its own axis. Scientists observing the X-Ray emanating from the Jovian atmosphere theorised that those coming from the equator were related to solar activity but it is definitely not a perfect mirror; only one in every few thousand X-Ray photons get reflected. But even that is very useful in predicting the solar weather. 'We found that Jupiter's day-to-day disk X-rays were synchronized with the Sun's emissions,' said Anil Bhardwaj at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, who led a new study using data from the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton telescope. Their work was detailed in Geophysical Research Letters."

Comments

Re:For Half of the Time, Anyway

[Bad D.N.A.]

We have done it, and we will do it again. A while back ESA launched the two HELIOS probes into orbits getting as close as ~ 0.3 AU. Excellent missions and a lot of very important data was obtained. There are numerous proposals in the works to launch spacecraft well within the Earth's orbit. The main post was a space-weather related issue and from that perspective 1 AU is fine. But if you really want to understand the physics going in you have to get in there and measure it.