On September 2nd, 1859, an enormous amount of energy produced by the sun crashed into the Earth’s atmosphere causing plenty of damages by just overpowering and overheating not only the earth but all it’s technology.(1) This phenomenon is called a solar storm. It starts because of an intense solar flare. A solar flare occurs because in the sun’s solar surface, a sudden release of stored magnetic energy accelerates all hot gases creating a massive eruption of charged particles that then explodes in outer space.(2) Once the explosion caused by solar flares has materialized, it turns into a solar storm that spreads around the sun’s magnetic field into interplanetary space (See Figure 1). Solar storms create major trouble for orbiting spacecraft …show more content…
This happened 161 years ago and the most updated technology was telegraph wires. This means that if a solar storm that powerful would happen today, it would cause terrible damage when hitting the satellites that all of our electronic devices that are powered by satellites will stop working. The National Academy of Science was interviewed in 2009 and they said that it could cost up to $2 trillion to repair the damage made by a solar storm that powerful and it would require four to ten years of recovery if a storm that harsh occurred today. For comparison, Hurricane Katrina inflicted somewhere between $80 billion and $125 billion in …show more content…
They are a good scientific solution to solar storms because although it does not stop the solar storm, it can detect it quickly enough before it collides with the Earth’s atmosphere and the LEO satellites. The solutions are also efficient because they process the solar storm and describes the important aspects of the storms: it accurately predicts the arrival time of the storm. How long will it take the storm to reach the Earth’s atmosphere. It also reports the potency of the solar storm. The solution describes how powerful and strong the storm is. This is very helpful because it can tell whether the storm is strong enough to damage the LEO satellites or if the storm is harmless to those satellites. It is important to know this information to decide whether to put the satellites on sleep mode or