NASA Announces New Spacecraft to Study Solar Weather

Question: What do astronauts in space, your cell phone, airplanes, and national security have in common?

Answer: They can all be adversely affected by solar flares.

That's where a trio of observational spacecraft come into play. SOHO, STEREO, and SDO are all spacecraft designed to warn us of impending-and potentially damaging-solar events.

Astronauts in Earth orbit are already exposed to significantly higher doses of radiation than the earthbound. When solar storms are imminent, space walks may have to be rescheduled or limited in order to protect the astronauts from potentially lethal doses of radiation.

According to recent research, solar flares and other bursts of energy from the sun can cause cell phone disruption, including noisy calls, dropped calls, or complete unavailability of signal.

Space weather can have an impact on flight plans, particularly when polar routes are involved. The crews that fly these routes regularly are exposed to higher than normal radiation levels to begin with, and a solar flare event can increase this radiation on order of magnitudes. Solar events can also have severe, potentially life-threatening effects on aircraft communications, avionics, and GPS navigation systems.

A severe solar storm can cause outages in Earth-orbiting satellites, or even complete failure of the satellites. In addition, solar events can cause increased drag on satellites in low earth orbit, in which case the orbit decays faster than expected and the satellite will burn up on Earth atmosphere re-entry sooner. Many large business, and even entire governments are dependent on satellite-transmitted information, and could be crippled or paralyzed in the event of a major satellite failure.

Accurate, up-to-the-minute data on solar events can prevent loss of equipment, and loss of life in these situations.