Team explores effect of space weather on communications

A team from Bath University’s Department for Electronic and Electrical Engineering has won one of four places on the 4.5kg UKube-1, which hopes to launch in January 2012.

Bath’s TOPCAT project will be one of the most comprehensive investigations into the effects of space weather on communications and will look at both the ionosphere and the less well-studied plasmasphere, which is at a higher altitude.

In recent years there has been increasing awareness about the effect of so-called space weather, which encompasses a range of solar phenomenon, including X-rays, electromagnetic radiation, radiowave bursts, and proton ejections.

These are generally mitigated well before they reach Earth, but because the activity of the sun waxes and wanes according to an 11-year cycle, bursts of energy can knock out GPS satellites and leave reliant systems vulnerable.

‘As the radiation comes off the sun it hits the Earth’s magnetosphere, which is the wider part of the plasmasphere, and it gets dragged in towards the ionosphere — that’s where it has the biggest effects. But actually knowing how the mechanism works, and how [radiation] moves from the plasmasphere to the ionosphere will be really helpful,’ said Bath researcher Dr Julian Rose.