14 DAY TRIAL // Officials at the American space agency announce the development of a new defensive measure against solar flares. Dubbed Solar Shield, the new system can provide ample forewarning on incoming solar storms, which can fry satellites and disrupt Earth-based power grids.
Powerful Sun storms can release massive streams of electrically-charged particles in our planet's direction. While the magnetosphere can protect us against them most of the times, it can fail under certain conditions.
When this happens, the effects of solar flares can fry sensitive electronic components in satellites, and can reach power grids on Earth, destroying transformers, and melting other components.
What Solar Shield does is predict the intensity and severeity of the effects of solar storms on particular areas of the globe, thus allowing grid managers to take the appropriate actions to avoid extended damage.
For example, shutting down key sections of grids would indeed cut power, but also save the infrastructure itself. Other strategies could also be formulated with enough time to plan, Space reports.
“It amounts to knowing 'something is coming and it may be big',” says expert Antti Pulkkinen, who is the project leader, and also a research associate, at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in Greenbelt, Maryland.
“We quickly feed the data into CCMC computers. Our models predict fields and currents in Earth's upper atmosphere and propagate these currents down to the ground,” he says.
The CCMC is the GSFC Community Coordinated Modeling Center, which deals with modeling the effects that solar flares detected by Sun-observing spacecrafts in orbit could trigger once they hit our planet's atmosphere.
“We'd like more power companies to join our research effort. The more data we can collect from the field, the faster we can test and improve Solar Shield,” Pulkkinen goes on to say.
At this point, the project is focused on analyzing coronal mass ejections, powerful explosions on the surface of the Sun that can release millions of tons of plasma and charged particles into the heliosphere.
CME can be very dangerous for life on Earth, and they become even more so as the Sun is approaching a new solar maximum in its 11-year cycle. This is due to take place around 2012-2013.