That Scary Ole Sun

A week ago I was helping my grandson do his project on “Stars”  including the closest one – our Sun. The 11yr sunspot cycle is on the rise with increasing Sunspot activity. With a range of satellites now surrounding the sun much more information is available on the Suns behaviour and inner workings.  Also with other recent “natural disasters”

Christchurch earthquakes, Ash clouds, Climate warming, Japanese tsunami , USA tornadoes – even our local tornado, I think there is a slowly growing awareness that Mother Nature is not always benign, but can very suddenly become a terrifying force .

In Sept. 1859, on the eve of a below-averagesolar cycle, the sun unleashed a  hugely energetic flare , inducing electrical currents that set telegraph offices on fire, and sparked Northern Lights over Cuba and Hawaii. “Do Solar Storms Threaten Life as We Know it?” The answer then and even more so now could very well be a scary “yes” – even within the next few years – as an increase in solar activity coincides with the increasing vulnerability of technology-dependent societies to powerful solar storms.

Some phrases to get familiar with –

Space weather  Conditions in space that effect Earth and its technological systems. Unlike the terrestrial weather elements we are all familiar with (moisture, temperature, pressure, etc.), the key players are electromagnetic energy (light, x-rays, etc), magnetic fields, and plasmaconsisting of ionized or charged atomic particles permeated by a magnetic field separate from that of the sun and earth.

Sunspots  Cooler and darker areas on the surface of the sun which follow an approximately 11 year cycle from minimum to maximum and back to minimum.

Solar Wind  Persistent, normal background stream of high-speed, ionized particles (mainly electrons and protons) ejected from the sun in all directions into interplanetary space.

Solar flares  Short explosive releases of energy seen as bright areas on the sun that radiate throughout the electromagnetic spectrum, including x-rays and radio wave lengths particularly relevant to earth and technological system vulnerabilities.

Coronal Mass Ejection (CME)  A billion ton cloud travelling at 1000km/sec composed of highlymagnetized atomic particles (plasma) . Violently propelled from the upper layer of the sun’s atmosphere (corona) and normally associated with a sunspot group and/or solar flare. Thesedisturbances are superimposed upon the background solar wind and, if directed towards earth, are the  causes of potentially disastrous geomagnetic storms 2-6 days after leaving the sun.

Geomagnetic Storm Large spikes in electrical currents in the atmosphere and on the ground induced by induced by interaction of Earth’s magnetic field with the solar wind supercharged by CMEs.

While its a matter of when not if, should there be a solar strike capable of causing widespread blackouts and crippling disruptions of satellite and radio communications, it’s likely there would be little advance notice, and currently there is virtually no capability to shield much of the planet and virtually no planning on the books to recover from the potentially disastrous consequences.

The solar flare that erupted from the sun on Valentine’s Day – the strongest solar eruption in four or five years – was a loud and clear wake-up call to the potentially dire threat of solar storms as we ramp up to the next peak in solar activity expected in the 2012-2013 timeframe. The resulting torrent of charged particles emanating from the sun arrived days later at the outer limits of Earth’s atmosphere where it interacted with Earth’s magnetic field, causing a geomagnetic storm and creating spectacular auroras. Luckily, the only disruptive consequences were interruptions in radio communications in the western Pacific Ocean and parts of Asia, which caused airlines to reroute some polar flights to avoid radio outages.

On the potential for a severe solar storm to take down telecommunications and power grids,  “This is not a matter of if; it’s simply a matter of when and how big.” Other experts warned that the United States must take the space storm threat seriously; adverse space weather is one of the principal threats to modern human technology; the world is overdue for a ferocious space storm that could knock out communications satellites, ground aircraft and trigger blackouts lasting months to years; and that no

single or series of earthly weather phenomena, earthquakes, volcanoes or tsunamis – even if occurring simultaneously – would come close to the possible devastating effects worldwide of an extreme space weather event.

Such an event would come with very little advance warning, since forecasting of space weather is in its infancy, and currently specific events are only predicted once a solar storm is observed to be headed toward Earth and just a few days out. Predictions as to whether a major hit is more likely than not are limited to about 12 hours in advance (at most).

So the moral of the story is, as Baden Powell said 150 years ago “Be Prepared”

Make sure you can exist – water/food/radio/torches/ for at least a couple of weeks, ( see the article in the previous Gannet) and even more importantly, get your head around the fact that the whole universe is a cruel and unforgiving place, full of hugely powerful forces.

– Ron Huston

 

 

 

Space – Goodbye Shuttle; the final flight!

Since 1981, NASA space shuttles have been rocketing from the Florida coast into Earth orbit. The five orbiters — Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour — have flown more than 130 times, carrying over 350 people into space and travelling more than half a billion iles, more than enough to reach Jupiter. Designed to return to Earth and land like a giant glider, the shuttle was the world’s first reusable space vehicle. More than all of that, though, the shuttle program expanded the limits of human achievement and broadened our understanding of our world.

The very last mission STS-134 ,crew members are Commander Mark Kelly, Pilot Gregory H. Johnson and Mission Specialists Michael Fincke, Greg Chamitoff, Andrew Feustel and European Space Agency astronaut Roberto Vittori.

During the 14-day mission, Endeavour will deliver the 7 1/2 ton Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) and spare parts including two S-band communications antennas, a high-pressure gas tank and additional spare parts.  This will be the 36th shuttle mission to the International Space Station.

It all started with STS-1, launched on April 12, 1981, just twenty years to the day after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. When astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen launched that morning in Columbia, it was the first time in history a new spacecraft was launched on its maiden voyage with a crew aboard.

For an entire generation, the space shuttle was NASA.  We’ve seen astronauts float free, and launch and repair spacecraft like Hubble which have fundamentally changed our understanding of the universe.

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2 (AMS) destined for the International Space Station already is collecting cosmic ray signatures, even as it sits in a work stand at the Space Station Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, said Prof. Samuel Ting, the principal investigator for the program. It ‘s not making any grand discoveries yet, since the particles it is picking up were stripped of some of their qualities when they passed through Earth’s atmosphere. But once in place aboard the space station, the 7 1/2-ton AMS will see charged particles as they exist in the vacuum of space.

Space shuttle Endeavour is to carry the AMS to the station in February 2011, and mount it on the truss that holds the orbiting laboratory’s main solar arrays.

Though he doesn’t know exactly what to expect, Ting has several ideas of what he hopes to find using the AMS, including the possibility that it opens up an entirely new field of particle physics. Up until now, he said, the study of cosmic rays has been limited to measuring light using telescopes and instruments like those on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

The AMS is to be the first to study charged particles in space, he said.

One of his desires is that the particles recorded by AMS prove the existence of a parallel universe made up of anti-matter, or particles that are, in electrical charge and magnetic properties, the exact opposite of regular particles. Such a universe has been theorized, but not proven. The discovery of massive amounts of anti-matter could answer fundamental questions about the universe’s origin.

Ting is also searching for proof of what makes up dark matter, the theoretical material that is thought to make up a large part of the universe. Also, AMS may point out whether all matter in the universe is made up of the same two kinds of quarks that make up all the known matter on Earth.

Although new particle accelerators were being built on Earth, Ting said he set out to study cosmic rays in space because, “no matter how large an accelerator you build, you can’t compete with space.” Cosmic rays produce particle energy almost a hundred million times more powerful than the world’s largest particle accelerator is capable of, he said.

When the longtime centerpiece of US spaceflight finishes, NASA will focus on experiments at the International Space Station (ISS) and on partnerships with private industry to build new spacecraft.

But with spending squeezed and NASA at odds with lawmakers over a 2016 timeframe for building a new heavy-lift rocket and crew vehicle to replace the 30-year-old shuttle program, Braun said that developing the future mode of travel could take another decade.

Up till then, Russia’s Soyuz space capsule will provide the sole method of transport for astronauts to and from the orbiting ISS. The US shuttles typically tote six or seven astronauts at a time; Soyuz tops out at three.

– Ron Huston