Greenies and the Liberal-Left New Class of chatterers have a very narrow sense of weather apocalypse. Their trendy concerns are with things at the grunter level, that they might see or otherwise experience, and get hot and bothered about, like a hot spell, or a flood, all quite natural, but for them, the sky falls. But really if one’s concern is falling skies, space weather is the thing to be worried about. A new Carrington Event, a solar CME (corona mass ejection) that in the 19th century roasted telegraph lines, would destroy much of the electric infrastructure off techno-industrial society, and there are debates about how long, if at all, things would take to rebuild. There are fictional books about such lights out scenarios. Trump began the process of hardening the grid, but since that time the problem has been left to simmer, as experts like Dr Peter Pry have repeatedly warmed. No discussion of his issue in Australia at all, so I would assume that our grid is totally unprotected from solar storms. As detailed below, the relatively mild solar storms are at present knocking out satellites. The big one narrowly missed the Earth in 2012 by hours, so it is not if, but when. Yes, no shortage of horrors, but at least we can do somethings to prepared for this, such as prepping food and water, and plenty of toilet paper, candles and matches.
“In late 2021, operators of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Swarm constellation noticed something worrying: The satellites, which measure the magnetic field around Earth, started sinking toward the atmosphere at an unusually fast rate — up to 10 times faster than before. The change coincided with the onset of the new solar cycle, and experts think it might be the beginning of some difficult years for spacecraft orbiting our planet.
“In the last five, six years, the satellites were sinking about two and a half kilometers [1.5 miles] a year,” Anja Stromme, ESA’s Swarm mission manager, told Space.com. “But since December last year, they have been virtually diving. The sink rate between December and April has been 20 kilometers [12 miles] per year.”
Satellites orbiting close to Earth always face the drag of the residual atmosphere, which gradually slows the spacecraft and eventually makes them fall back to the planet. (They usually don’t survive this so-called re-entry and burn up in the atmosphere.) This atmospheric drag forces the International Space Station’s controllers to perform regular “reboost” maneuvers to maintain the station’s orbit of 250 miles (400 km) above Earth.
This drag also helps clean up the near-Earth environment from space junk. Scientists know that the intensity of this drag depends on solar activity — the amount of solar wind spewed by the sun, which varies depending on the 11-year solar cycle. The last cycle, which officially ended in December 2019, was rather sleepy, with a below-average number of monthly sunspots and a prolonged minimum of barely any activity. But since last fall, the star has been waking up, spewing more and more solar wind and generating sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections at a growing rate. And the Earth’s upper atmosphere has felt the effects.
“There is a lot of complex physics that we still don’t fully understand going on in the upper layers of the atmosphere where it interacts with the solar wind,” Stromme said. “We know that this interaction causes an upwelling of the atmosphere. That means that the denser air shifts upwards to higher altitudes.”
Denser air means higher drag for the satellites. Even though this density is still incredibly low 250 miles above Earth, the increase caused by the upwelling atmosphere is enough to virtually send some of the low-orbiting satellites plummeting.
“It’s almost like running with the wind against you,” Stromme said. “It’s harder, it’s drag — so it slows the satellites down, and when they slow down, they sink.”
Knocked down by a solar storm
The Swarm constellation, launched in 2013, consists of three satellites, two of which orbit Earth at an altitude of 270 miles (430 km), about 20 miles (30 km) above the International Space Station. The third Swarm satellite circles the planet somewhat higher — about 320 miles (515 km) above ground. The two lower-orbiting spacecraft were hit more by the sun’s acting out than the higher satellite was, Stromme said.
The situation with the lower two got so precarious that by May, operators had to start raising the satellites’ altitude using onboard propulsion to save them.
ESA’s Swarm satellites are not the only spacecraft struggling with worsening space weather. In February, SpaceX lost 40 brand-new Starlink satellites that were hit by a solar storm just after launch.
The sun unleashed a major X1.1 class solar flare from an active sunspot cluster on its eastern limb on April 17, 2022 GMT. This view was taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.
In such storms, satellites suddenly drop to lower altitudes. The lower the orbit of the satellites when the solar storm hits, the higher the risk of the spacecraft not being able to recover, leaving operators helplessly watching as the craft fall to their demise in the atmosphere.
Starlink satellites have operational orbits of 340 miles (550 km), which is above the most at risk region. However, after launch, Falcon 9 rockets deposit the satellite batches very low, only about 217 miles (350 km) above Earth. SpaceX then raises the satellites’ orbits using onboard propulsion units.
The company says that approach has advantages, as any satellite that experiences technical problems after launch would quickly fall back to Earth and not turn into pesky space debris. However, the increasing and unpredictable behavior of the sun makes those satellites vulnerable to mishaps.
New space and the unpredictable sun
All spacecraft around the 250-mile altitude are bound to have problems, Stromme said. That includes the International Space Station, which will have to perform more frequent reboost maneuvers to keep afloat, but also the hundreds of cubesats and small satellites that have populated low Earth orbit in the past decade. Those satellites — a product of the new space movement spearheaded by private entrepreneurs pioneering simple, cheap technologies — are particularly vulnerable.
“Many of these [new satellites] don’t have propulsion systems,” Stromme said. “They don’t have ways to get up. That basically means that they will have a shorter lifetime in orbit. They will reenter sooner than they would during the solar minimum.”
By coincidence (or beginner’s luck), the onset of the new space revolution came during that sleepy solar cycle. These new operators are now facing their first solar maximum. But not only that. The sun’s activity in the past year turned out to be much more intense than solar weather forecasters predicted, with more sunspots, more coronal mass ejections and more solar wind hitting our planet.
“The solar activity is a lot higher than the official forecast suggested,” Hugh Lewis, a professor of engineering and physical sciences at the University of Southampton in the U.K. who studies the behavior of satellites in low Earth orbit, told Space.com. “In fact, the current activity is already quite close to the peak level that was forecasted for this solar cycle, and we are still two to three years away from the solar maximum.”
Stromme confirmed those observations. “The solar cycle 25 that we are entering now is currently increasing very steeply,” she said. “We do not know if this means that it will be a very tough solar cycle. It could slow down, and it could become a very weak solar cycle. But right now, it’s increasing fast.”
Cleaning up orbits
While the harsh solar activity is bad news for satellite operators, who will see the lifetimes of their missions shortened (even satellites with onboard propulsion will run out of fuel much faster because of the need for frequent altitude boosts), the situation will have some welcome purifying effects on the space around Earth.
In addition to becoming populated with hundreds of new satellites over the past decade, this region of space is cluttered with a worrying amount of space debris (old satellites, spent rocket stages and collision fragments).
Researchers like Lewis have long warned that the omnipresent junk hurtling around the planet threatens the safety of satellite services, forcing operators to conduct frequent avoidance maneuvers. Moreover, the debris might trigger an out-of-control situation known as Kessler syndrome, an unstoppable cascade of collisions as depicted in the 2013 Oscar-winning movie “Gravity.”
“Generally speaking, increasing solar activity — and its effect on the upper atmosphere — is good news from a space debris perspective, as it reduces orbital lifetimes of the debris and provides a useful ‘cleaning service,'” Lewis said.
According to Jonathan McDowell, a space debris expert at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the positive effect can already be observed, as fragments produced by the November 2021 Russian anti-satellite missile test are now coming down much faster than before.
However, there is a downside to this cleansing process.
“The increased rate of decay of debris objects can be perceived almost like rain,” Lewis said. “When solar activity is high, the ‘rain’ rate is higher, and missions at lower altitudes will potentially experience a greater flux of debris.”
A greater flux of debris means the need for even more frequent fuel-burning avoidance maneuvers and a temporarily increased risk of collisions, which could potentially generate more dangerous fragments.
Stromme and her colleagues are currently raising the orbit of the two low-orbiting Swarm satellites by 28 miles (45 km). The satellites might require even more adjustments later this year, she added. The goal is to help the mission, which is currently in its ninth year and beyond its originally planned lifetime, to get through the solar cycle. Whether the team succeeds will largely depend on the behavior of the sun.
“We still have fuel to get us hopefully through another solar cycle,” Stromme said. “If it grows like now, I will use up the fuel before the solar cycle is finished. If it slows down a little, I might save them through the solar cycle.”
Then there is the Kessler Syndrome problem, where the accumulation of space junk, and there is plenty up there, reaches a point of criticality that it becomes a real danger to satellites, which in turn after impact, creates more space junk in a cascading effect.
https://www.space.com/kessler-syndrome-space-debris
“The Kessler Syndrome is a phenomenon in which the amount of junk in orbit around Earth reaches a point where it just creates more and more space debris, causing big problems for satellites, astronauts and mission planners.
Consider this scenario: The destruction of a dead spy satellite spawns a swarm of debris in Earth orbit, which wreaks ever-increasing havoc as it zooms around our planet.
The cloud destroys a number of communications satellites, generating more and more debris with every violent collision. It takes out the iconic Hubble Space Telescope and a NASA space shuttle, killing several crewmembers aboard the winged vehicle. It then lines the International Space Station (ISS) up in its crosshairs, destroying the $100 billion orbiting lab with a hail of fast-flying shrapnel.
This dramatic scene is fictional, of course; it's pulled from the award-winning 2013 sci-fi film "Gravity." But many satellite operators, mission planners and exploration advocates worry that it could be a dark window into a future that's all too real, thanks to the Kessler Syndrome.
The Kessler Syndrome is named after former NASA scientist Donald Kessler, who laid out the basic idea in a seminal 1978 paper.
In that study, titled "Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites: The Creation of a Debris Belt(opens in new tab)," Kessler and co-author Burton Cour-Palais noted that the likelihood of satellite collisions increases as more and more spacecraft are lofted to orbit. And each such smashup would have an outsized impact on the orbital environment.
"Satellite collisions would produce orbiting fragments, each of which would increase the probability of further collisions, leading to the growth of a belt of debris around the Earth," the duo wrote. "The debris flux in such an Earth-orbiting belt could exceed the natural meteoroid flux, affecting future spacecraft designs."
The Kessler Syndrome describes, and warns of, a cascade of orbital debris that could potentially hinder humanity's space ambitions and activities down the road. The original paper predicted that satellite collisions would become a source of space junk by the year 2000, if not sooner, unless humanity changed how it lofted payloads to orbit. But a timeline is not essential to the core idea.
"It was never intended to mean that the cascading would occur over a period of time as short as days or months. Nor was it a prediction that the current environment was above some critical threshold," Kessler wrote in a 2009 paper(opens in new tab) that clarified the definition of the Kessler Syndrome and discussed its implications.
"The 'Kessler Syndrome' was meant to describe the phenomenon that random collisions between objects large enough to catalogue would produce a hazard to spacecraft from small debris that is greater than the natural meteoroid environment," he added. "In addition, because the random collision frequency is non-linear with debris accumulation rates, the phenomenon will eventually become the most important long-term source of debris, unless the accumulation rate of larger, non-operational objects (e.g., non-operational payloads and upper-stage rocket bodies) in Earth orbit were significantly reduced."
And Kessler didn't name this scenario after himself. In that 2009 paper, he explained that "Kessler Syndrome" apparently originated with John Gabbard, a scientist with the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) who kept an unofficial record of big satellite breakups in orbit.
Gabbard used the term when talking to a reporter shortly after the 1978 study came out. The Kessler Syndrome then worked its way into the public consciousness, "becoming part of the storyline in some science fiction, and a three-word summary describing orbital debris issues," Kessler wrote in the 2009 paper.
To give you another idea of how influential the 1978 study was: A year later, NASA established the Orbital Debris Program Office at Johnson Space Center in Houston and made Kessler its head. (Kessler, who was born in 1940, retired from NASA in 1996(opens in new tab) with the title of senior scientist for orbital debris research. But he remains active in the debris research community today.)
Earth orbit is getting more and more crowded as the years go by.
Humanity has launched about 12,170 satellites since the dawn of the space age in 1957, according to the European Space Agency(opens in new tab) (ESA), and 7,630 of them remain in orbit today — but only about 4,700 are still operational.
That means there are nearly 3,000 defunct spacecraft zooming around Earth at tremendous speeds, along with other big, dangerous pieces of debris like upper-stage rocket bodies. For example, orbital velocity at 250 miles (400 kilometers) up, the altitude at which the ISS flies, is about 17,100 mph (27,500 kph).
At such speeds, even a tiny shard of debris can do serious damage to a spacecraft — and there are huge numbers of such fragmentary bullets zipping around our planet. ESA estimates that Earth orbit harbors at least 36,500 debris objects that are more than 4 inches (10 centimeters) wide, 1 million between 0.4 inches and 4 inches (1 to 10 cm) across, and a staggering 330 million that are smaller than 0.4 inches (1 cm) but bigger than 0.04 inches (1 millimeter).
These objects pose more than just a hypothetical threat. From 1999 to May 2021, for example, the ISS conducted 29 debris-avoiding maneuvers, including three in 2020 alone, according to NASA officials(opens in new tab). And that number continues to grow; the station performed another such move in November 2021, for example.
Many of the smaller pieces of space junk were spawned by the explosion of spent rocket bodies in orbit, but others were more actively emplaced. In January 2007, for instance, China intentionally destroyed one of its defunct weather satellites in a much-criticized test of anti-satellite technology that generated more than 3,000 tracked debris objects(opens in new tab) and perhaps 32,000 others too small to be detected. The vast majority of that junk remains in orbit today, experts say.
Spacecraft have also collided with each other on orbit. The most famous such incident occurred in February 2009, when Russia's defunct Kosmos 2251 satellite slammed into the operational communications craft Iridium 33, producing nearly 2,000 pieces of debris(opens in new tab) bigger than a softball.
That 2009 smashup might be evidence that the Kessler Syndrome is already upon us, though a cataclysm of "Gravity" proportions is still a long way off.
"The cascade process can be more accurately thought of as continuous and as already started, where each collision or explosion in orbit slowly results in an increase in the frequency of future collisions."”
While there is no present danger from the giant sunspot which presently has the Earth in its sights, this example shows that solar events like this can happen at any time. And, we have zero control over the sun.
“A fast-growing giant sunspot that can emit solar flares has more than doubled in size in recent days and is currently facing Earth, according to experts.
Sunspots are dark areas of strong magnetic fields on the sun’s surface. They appear dark because they are much colder than other parts of the sun’s surface, having formed at areas where magnetic fields are particularly strong, according to NASA.
Because of the strong magnetic field, magnetic pressure increases while the surrounding atmospheric pressure decreases, resulting in the lower temperatures.
Sunspots are also associated with eruptive disturbances such as solar flares, which are fast moving eruptions of radiation, and coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which is when large masses of plasma and highly magnetized particles violently eject from the sun. Flares move at the speed of light and take about eight minutes to reach earth, while CMEs can take three to four days to reach earth.
The fast-growing sunspot noted by experts is known as AR3038.
“Yesterday, sunspot AR3038 was big. Today, it’s enormous,” Tony Phillips, the author of SpaceWeather.com wrote on Wednesday. “The fast-growing sunspot has doubled in size in only 24 hours,” Phillips added.
The expert noted that the magnetic field surrounding AR3038 could potentially blast M-class solar flares, or medium-sized flares, towards Earth.
Photos from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory taken on June 22 show the sun with numerous sunspots, with AR3038 looking particularly big after evolving over the past few days.
The sunspot has doubled in size each day for the past three days and is roughly 2.5 times the size of Earth, C. Alex Young, associate director for science in the Heliophysics Science Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in an email to USA Today.
‘No Cause for Concern’
However, Rob Steenburgh, the acting lead of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Forecast Office has said there is no need to panic, noting that sunspots naturally grow in size.
“This is what sunspots do,” he told USA Today. “Over time, generally, they’ll grow. They go through stages, and then they decay.”
Young also noted that while the sunspot is producing flares, it “does not have the complexity for the largest flares” and there is only a 30 percent chance that it will create medium-sized flares. The chances it will create large flares are even smaller at 10 percent, the expert said.
- Dean Pesnell, the project scientist of the Solar Dynamics Observatory, also offered reassurance that there is no need for concern, telling the publication that AR3038 is a “modest-sized active region” that “has not grown abnormally rapidly and is still somewhat small in area.”
As of June 22, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), which monitors solar flares, has not issued any warnings for them.
However, if solar flares such as an X1-class solar flare are released from the sun, they can potentially create disruptions to communication satellites and long-distance cables here on earth, wreaking havoc with the world’s internet.
Another expert, Andrés Muñoz-Jaramillo, lead scientist at the SouthWest Research Institute in San Antonio, also stressed that there is no need for concern, explaining: “I want to emphasize there is no need to panic,” and that the sunspots “happen all the time.”
“We are prepared and doing everything we can to predict and mitigate their effects. For the majority of us, we don’t need to lose sleep over it,” Muñoz-Jaramillo said.’
Well then, everyone back to sleep until the next Carrington Event.