A new generation of satellites will try to predict disruptive solar flares and disturbances before they wreak havoc with our cell phones.
Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin won a $178 million contract to design and develop the Solar Ultraviolet Imager (SUVI), which will help forecast solar disturbances. The first of the new generation of geostationary satellites in the series is set to launch in December 2014.
“There are such a wide range of impacts that are becoming more and more prominent,” said Steven Hill, physicist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration?s Space Environment Center. The most common system disruption is to Global Positioning Systems, which can lose accuracy.
Aside from telling you to turn your car into a store front, disturbances can disrupt anything from the GPS-based surveys for roads to commercial and government communications.
“The SUVI will provide important solar observations critical for early warning of Solar Radiation Storms,” Space Environment Center Director Tom Bogdan said in a statement. “It will allow us to continually monitor solar and geophysical disturbances and issue real-time alerts and warnings to customers like commercial satellite operators and NASA.”
The SUVI will monitor the entire range of solar X-rays, including features like coronal holes and solar flares, as well as estimate the physical conditions in the sun?s atmosphere. These data can be used for geomagnetic storm forecasts and observations of solar flares. The worst disturbances, X-ray radio blackouts, happen almost instantly, Hill said, and are the most disruptive to military operations and the toughest to predict. “The best thing is to know why it?s happening so you can suspend operations or not rely on those sensitive equipment.”
Solar radiation storms can be predicted 15 to 20 minutes in advance, he said, and geomagnetic storms ? bubbles of superheated gas, particles and other matter ? take one to three days to hit, but can be devastating to aircraft flying over the poles.
