Proposed UK satellite mission promises 5 day solar forecast

The proposed mission, named Carrington-L5, would give a five-day warning of hazardous solar activity that could inflict severe damage to infrastructure back on Earth.

Coronal mass ejections (CME), billion-tonne solar plasma eruptions moving towards the Earth at up to 2,500 kilometres per second, can cause extensive and expensive disruption by damaging power, satellite and communication networks.  The UK government added solar storms to the National Risk Register of Civil Emergencies in 2011, whilst the Met Office set up a special department, the Met Office Space Weather Operations Centre (MOSWOC), to deal with the threat.

The goal of the project, which also involves teams from the Met Office, Mullard Space Science Laboratory, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and Imperial College London is to provide continuous data from a stable orbit, necessary for the Met Office to provide 5-day forecasts and increase the accuracy of CME arrival forecasts.

According to the team, this would have considerable advantages over existing warning systems, which are based on ageing spacecraft not designed to provide 24/7 data such as NASA’s STEREO project which launched two spacecraft into orbit around the sun in 2006.