NASA Notices New, Nasty Solar Storm Type

saskboy writes "Solar Storms generally aren't this bad, but in January unique conditions led to a "proton superhighway" that bombarded earth with fast moving protons that could have harmed astronauts caught without a radiation shield. "Scant minutes after the January 20th [2005] flare, a swarm of high-speed protons surrounded Earth and the Moon. Thirty minutes later, the most intense proton storm in decades was underway." Listen to the story here. Archives from the January storms are also available from SpaceWeather.com"

Comments

It's too bad that we don't have a constellation of

[multiplexo]

satellites that could constantly monitor the entire Sun. If we were to put a satellite into the Earth-Sun L1, L4 and L5 points we'd have good coverage of 120 degrees of the Sun's surface. An L3 satellite, appropriately stabilised in its orbit (which we'd also have to do with the L1 satellite) would give us coverage of the side of the Sun opposite the Earth. This data could be relayed back to Earth via the satellites at L4 and L5. This would leave some blind spots which could be filled in by placing a satellite in Venus-Sun L4 and L5 points (Venus Equilateral anyone?) and relaying back to Earth appropriately.

It would be really cool to be able to have data from the entire Solar surface instead of our currently limited view. It would also be handy to know if a solar storm was brewing on another part of the Sun and was likely to let loose when that portion of the Sun rotated to face Earth.

SOHO, STEREO, SDO, etc.

[oneiros27]

The problem is, that although you can place satellites there, getting data from some of these places is a big problem, because you have to schedule antenna time through the deep space network.

Currently, there's the ESA-NASA project SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, which sits near L1. You can't actually place it directly in the sun-earth line, because then you can't communicate with the satellite, because of too much noise from the sun.

Currently in testing are the two observatories called STEREO, the Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory, which will launch two satellites flung ahead and behind the earth (but because of the physics involved, they have no way of stopping them, because they won't have enough fuel to stop.

(and there's also the Japanese Solar-B project, which is the successor to Yohkoh, set for launch next year)

But in my opinion, the most significant solar observing satellite in planning is SDO, the Solar Dynamics Observatory. (and I say this purely from an IT standpoint) SDO will be at an inclined geosyncronous orbit -- so it will be able to talk to a single antenna the whole time -- rather than storing up its data, and then sending it down to earth once a day, it will be sending a constant stream of full resolution data.

And we're not talking about the 1megapixel images from SOHO/EIT or SOHO/TRACE instruments -- or even the 4megapixel from STEREO/SECCHI. We're talking about 16 megapixel images, every 10 seconds from one of the instruments, with a planned terrabyte of uncompressed data per day.

Oh -- and I work for NASA contractor, and am assigned to work on STEREO and VSO (the Virtual Solar Observatory, a search engine for solar physics data).