Storms from the Sun: The Emerging Science of Space Weather (2002)

Available on the World Wide Web at http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/articles/eisbaker.html.

At the peak of the solar cycle in 2000, PanAmSat felt compelled to post a “statement on solar activity” on the front of its corporate web site. Acknowledging the threat of solar activity and solar maximum, the company noted: “As a global satellite operator, we are prepared to fly our satellites in the varied conditions of space. The recent solar flares, although powerful, are a highly predictable ‘weather’ condition, and we expect no impact to our fleet. . . . Based on our knowledge of the effects on spacecraft of environmental conditions in space, we do not believe these conditions will have any material adverse effect on our fleet. To our knowledge, no such effects were suffered by any communications satellite during the last peak period of solar flare activity. . . . PanAmSat’s satellites are designed with shielding to protect against most of the major conditions that will be created during peak periods of solar flare activity.”

It is an unlikely coincidence of nature that the Sun and the Moon are almost exactly the same size from the perspective of Earth. The Sun

is about 400 times larger than the Moon, but it is also 400 times farther away.

While plasma is extremely rare on Earth—you can only find it in lightning, fluorescent lights, and candle flames—it is actually the cosmic lifeblood. Scientists estimate that more than 95 percent of the visible mass of the universe is comprised of plasma.

To his credit, Celsius and protégé Olof Hiorter would later use the deflection of compass needles to show that auroras were related to magnetism.

As noted in Dava Sobel’s 1995 book, Longitude, Graham was a patron and key supporter of John Harrison, who developed the chronometer that solved the longitude problem of navigation.

Birkeland was a colorful character. Science was not well funded around the end of the nineteenth century, so Birkeland engaged in a variety of activities to raise money. One of his ideas was to build and sell an electromagnetic cannon. Unfortunately, during the first demonstration of the cannon to an audience of dignitaries and representatives of industry (including representatives of Krupps, the German weapons maker), it blew up when he closed the switch. Birkeland nonetheless used this failure to found a new industry. He teamed up with an engineer, Sam Eyde, whom he’d met a dinner party and who was looking for a way to create artificial lightening in order to generate nitrogen compounds. Their partnership led to the invention of the electromagnetic furnace for producing nitrogen fertilizers. Together, Birkeland and Eyde founded Norsk Hydro, which began commercial production of fertilizer, and both became wealthy men. Today, Birkeland is immortalized by his portrait on the Norwegian 200 Kroner note.

In the wake of the 1859 storm, Loomis began to construct the first of several maps of the frequency of the appearance of northern lights by geographic region. Scientific data gathering confirmed what the unscientific observer could have suspected—auroras were most frequent in the high latitudes of Scandinavia, Canada, Alaska, and Greenland, forming a ring that is tilted slightly toward North America due to the location of Earth’s magnetic North Pole in northern Canada.

Not content with his laboratory experiments, Birkeland undertook several expeditions to northern Scandinavia to establish observatories for studying the aurora. Since one needs a dark sky to see the northern lights, Birkeland made his expeditions during the winter, which nearly cost him his life. He also wanted to spend the winter on a mountaintop in Finland because he had heard that the aurora would come down and touch the mountains. Alex Dessler pointed out that if the story was true, Birkeland would have been engulfed by the aurora, but Birkeland was not the least bit concerned.

As author and astronomer Steve Maran points out, the Sun is by no means average: “The vast majority of all stars are smaller, dimmer, cooler, and less massive than our Sun.” So if you are measuring the Sun against the extremes of stars, it is somewhere in the middle. But if you measure it against the population of the universe, it is rather large.

Since scientists began making X-ray measurements of flares in 1976, only two flares have surpassed the potent blast of March 6, 1989. On August 16, 1989, the Sun popped off an X-20 flare, the highest classification. The most potent flare ever recorded sprang from the Sun on April 2, 2001, as described in the prologue of this book. Officially classified as an X-20 flare, the flare was actually off the scale. Of the 23 largest flares on record, only 4 occurred prior to the peak of the solar cycle, with the rest occurring at the maximum or on the way down from the height of activity. The worst year for large solar flares was 1991, with 8 of the 23 flares in the record books. The latest flare in a solar cycle occurred in May 1984, more than four years after solar maximum. The November 1997 flare was the earliest in a cycle to make the list—only 18 months after solar minimum.

There is not just one international standard index of magnetic storms. The 1989 storm is either the first, second, or third most potent magnetic storm since scientists began regular reporting in the 1930s, depending on which index you choose.

According to Boteler, the first reported effect on electric power systems occurred on March 14, 1940, though GICs probably affected power lines from the very first installation. On Easter Sunday 1940, a major magnetic storm sent stray currents through telegraph and power systems in North America. More than 20 power companies in New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Ontario, and Quebec reported disturbances.

Anticipating the solar maximum period predicted for 1957 to 1958, the International Council of Scientific Unions in 1952 proposed a comprehensive series of global geophysical activities modeled on the International Polar Years of 1882 to 1883 and 1932 to 1933. The International Geophysical Year (IGY), as it was called, was planned for the period from July 1957 to December 1958. The intention was to allow scientists from around the world to take part in a series of coordinated observations of various geophysical phenomena. Initially, scientists from 46 countries originally agreed to participate; by the close of the IGY, 67 countries had contributed. IGY activities spanned the globe from the North to the South Poles, with much of the work conducted in the arctic, antarctic, and equatorial regions.

The Explorer I satellite—the first launched by the United States—had been orbiting the Earth for 11 days when the February 1958 storm arrived. James Van Allen wrote an article about the event as recently as 1999.

In November 1903, The New York Times reported that all of the streetcars of Geneva, Switzerland, were “brought to a sudden standstill” for a half-hour by a potent magnetic storm. The event caused “consternation at the generating works, where all efforts to discover the cause were fruitless.” According to British meteorologists of the time, the streetcar and telegraph troubles were attributable to sunspots and solar activity, “which would also account for the unusual wet season now being experienced.”

In 1999 the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratory announced that it was awarding a $1 million contract to a company to develop a radiation-hardened Pentium-powered computer board. The

board would be close to seven times as powerful as today’s space-based computer systems, which typically lag years behind the power and capability of even commercially available personal computers.

The angst over sharing information about space weather and satellites is not limited to private or Western industry. In February 2001, Russia’s FSB domestic security agency (the successor to the KGB) arrested a physicist in Siberia for selling space research information to China. Valentin Danilov, head of the Thermo-Physics Center of the Krasnoyarsk State Technical University, was charged with treason for trying to sell research on the effects of space weather on satellites. His research had been a state secret until 1992, but it was in the public domain for most of the past decade. Chinese colleagues had taken an interest in his work, perhaps too much interest for old Cold Warriors who still feel that satellite technology is a national interest worth protecting.

Gautam Badhwar died suddenly in August 2001 at the age of 60. He was in the midst of leading two major experiments in radiation effects in space, with instruments on the International Space Station and the Mars Odyssey spacecraft. He will be greatly missed.

Rem stands for Roentgen equivalent man, a measure of the amount of radiation it takes to affect organic materials and human tissues. Radiation doses are measured in several different units. The amount of radiation per unit of mass is often measured in rads and Grays (100 rads equals 1 Gray); biological exposures are now typically measured in sieverts, with 1 sievert being equivalent to 100 rem. One rad of radiation typically equals between 2.2 and 2.5 sieverts, depending on the spectrum of the radioactive particles.

The Mars Odyssey spacecraft that traveled to the red planet in 2001 carries a set of instruments designed by Gautam Badhwar and colleagues to measure the cosmic and solar radiation that reaches Mars’s atmosphere. During the 30 months of Odyssey’s main mission, the Mars Radiation Environment Experiment (MARIE) is supposed to collect data on the amount and type of radiation deposited in the Martian atmosphere, for use in preparing for future human flights. However, when Odyssey arrived at Mars in October 2001, MARIE’s software was malfunctioning. Mission operators and engineers were working to restore the instrument, which did not appear to be catastrophically damaged.

The largest solar maximum in recorded history occurred in March 1958, during solar cycle 19, when the sunspot number reached 201. About four major solar flares occurred during that maximum. In solarmax 20 (1968) the sunspot number peaked at 110, with just one major flare, and in solarmax 21 (1979) the sunspot count reached 164, but there were no major flare events. In the now-famous solar cycle 22 (1989), the peak sunspot number reached 158, modest compared to 1958, but the number of large solar flares was 8.

In the summer of 2001, at the recommendation of a panel of space and solar physicists, NASA announced the cancellation of the International Solar-Terrestrial Physics program. Despite the fact that all of the spacecraft were working, the agency decided that official coordination of the individual missions was a scientific luxury it could no longer afford in a tough budget environment. The Wind spacecraft was slated for a sort of space storage as a backup to ACE, and NASA withdrew its support for Wind’s science investigators and for the American participants in Japan’s Geotail mission. IMP-8, a venerable craft that had contributed data on interplanetary space for 25 years, was shut down, and the SAMPEX and FAST missions to study auroras and the inner magnetosphere were scheduled for shutdown in 2003 and 2004, respectively. SOHO, Polar, and Cluster were funded at reduced budget levels and encouraged to coordinate their work with other missions. But they were not given much funding to pay for the tasks of coordination, and funding for some of the key elements of the ISTP success story—the theory and modeling programs, the data centers, and the ground-based observatories—was almost entirely cut off.