NEW YORK: A new satellite is on a 1.5 million-kilometer, 110-day journey toward the sun. Once it reaches its orbit, DSCOVR the Deep Space Climate Observatory will replace an aging craft to monitor space weather.
DSCOVR will be fixed in orbit at L1, the so-called Lagrange point where the gravitational pull of the sun and of Earth cancel each other out. From this distant outpost, it will document the continuous stream of charged solar particles.
Life on Earth is mostly protected from those particles by the planet’s magnetic field and atmosphere. But Thomas Berger, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado, said large-scale eruptions from the sun, called coronal mass ejections, can still be dangerous.
“Those are really, really large magnetic clouds that are expelled from the sun at very, very high speeds … and when those impact the Earth, that’s like a tsunami or a hurricane impacting the Earth in terms of space weather,” he said.
Violent space weather can disable electric power grids, knock out satellites, and interrupt radio signals and aviation communications systems. This year marks the peak of the 11-year solar cycle, when extreme weather on the sun can most affect life on Earth.
Berger said full recovery from a really bad solar storm could take four to 10 years and cost between $1 trillion and $2 trillion, according to a recent report published by the National Research Council.
“There really is not much we can do about it, given that the sun is a gigantic star and we are just a tiny little planet in its orbit. However,” he pointed out, “NOAA’s job and the Space Weather Prediction Center’s job in particular is to predict these phenomena and give people the watches, warnings and alerts that they need to take mitigation action.”
