Mission Space launches next quarter to provide real-time space weather forecasts
When you board a plane, the pilot already knows the weather on the flight path and can steer clear, or at least warn you it's coming.
The same can’t be said of “space weather” from solar events, which can seriously affect satellites and even passenger planes.
Mission Space is about to launch a constellation provide near-real-time monitoring of this increasingly important phenomenon.
Space weather is a general term for the radiation in the near-Earth environment; outside the planet’s protective aura, satellites and spacecraft feel the full brunt of the sun’s rays, and a solar storm can interfere with or disable them. The type and intensity of this radiation shifts and flows just like atmospheric weather, but being invisible and moving at the speed of light, it’s considerably more difficult to observe and predict.
There are numerous satellites and deep-space missions that monitor solar radiation, but they are necessarily limited; imagine trying to predict the path of a storm using only a handful of wind and rain sensors scattered across the ocean. And while historically this has been sufficient, the growth of the new space economy has transformed space weather from an occasional inconvenience to a constant and quantifiable threat.
“More and more companies are putting space weather on their agenda,” said Alex Po, CEO and founder of Mission Space. “We have 7,000 satellites in space, but in ten years it’ll be 50,000; that means space weather events will be the same as now, but they will have ten times the impact.”
A serious solar storm is not dangerous not only to electronics, but also to unprepared astronauts. If someone happens to be doing a spacewalk, they could get a face full of radiation — and if we want to establish a permanent presence on the Moon, where there’s similarly little protection, we’ll want to know exactly when it’s safe to go outside.
Nearer the surface, airlines are concerned about passengers getting large doses of radiation during a long flight over the poles, and some have even canceled flights because of it. And there are numerous secondary effects on services that rely on satellites, including precision agriculture.
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