Agencies rush to replace aging satellite to predict damaging solar storms

The country's best defense against a solar storm that could knock out networks operating power lines, navigation systems and financial services is a satellite near the end of its useful life that NASA launched in 1997.

Now agencies across the federal government -- and the world -- are racing to install a replacement and reinforce it with other farsighted forecasting instruments before a natural space disaster strikes.

In the United States, predicting space weather -- environmental conditions on the sun that affect the Earth's magnetic field -- is the responsibility of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But departments ranging from the European Space Agency to the Federal Emergency Management Agency also play roles in protecting U.S. citizens and companies from the sun's effects.

"Space is one of the areas where multinational cooperation works really well," said Brendan Curry, vice president of Washington operations for the Space Foundation, a nonprofit organization that advocates for space missions, professionals and education.

Every 11 years, solar activity intensifies, and the next peak in activity is scheduled for 2013. The most significant storm on record hit in 1859, illuminating the night sky in light and shorting telegraph systems worldwide. Sparks shocked operators and set paper aflame.

Today, space weather of that magnitude would be a significant problem for spacecraft, astronauts and planes flying in high altitudes because they would encounter radiation from solar material. Such conditions also would interfere with modern high-frequency radio communications and GPS navigation. The nation has become increasingly dependent on communications and location-based technologies, including smart phones, electronic financial transactions and power grids, so the impact would be far greater than it was in 1859, federal officials said.

"The whole thing about going into another active period of solar activity is: It's going to happen. We just don't know when, we don't know the severity of it, but we know it has happened," FEMA Administrator W. Craig Fugate said in June at the U.S. government's annual space weather conference, which focused on critical infrastructure protection. "This isn't just a hypothetical what-if. We actually know. We have seen these events occur before, so this isn't something that we've got to go convince people that this might happen. It has happened. We're just fortunate that the frequency is not that great."

To gauge the severity and timing of solar hyperactivity, the federal government has transmitted data in real-time from the Advanced Composition Explorer satellite since 1997. ACE is "what FEMA thinks is really one of the most valuable assets we have," said Thomas Bogdan, director of NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center. "With ACE, I have the ability to say to Mr. Fugate or someone on the National Security Council, you have 25 minutes and the storm of the century is going to be here. Without ACE, I lose that entirely."

NOAA also computes predictions based on Earth observations of the sun, but those estimates of the proximity of a disturbance are error-prone, he said, whereas ACE has a direct line of sight to any oncoming storm.

Advance warnings about looming eruptions enable the government to pinpoint satellites that might take a hit, utilities that could experience disruptions and navigation systems that might become unreliable. NOAA can alert civilian and military satellite operators so that they can choose whether to power down satellites and switch to back up systems for electricity and navigation.

"You could potentially lose power to a third or half, or [in] one or two cases, two-thirds of the [U.S.] population for durations of hours to days to weeks," Fugate said, contemplating the possible aftermath. "And that we may only have hours before that event occurs to make that decision to take the system down or lose it. We may see the event coming, but to actually make the decision, you may have a very short window."

But ACE was designed to operate only until 1999. So, federal agencies are collaborating on backup plans. "Luckily, the folks that need to be worrying about it are worrying about it," Curry said. "You have smart people who really care and are looking to tackle it."

The Air Force is expected to launch NASA's replacement for ACE, called the Deep Space Climate Observatory, in December 2013. President Obama's fiscal 2011 budget requested a small amount -- $9.5 million -- for the effort, and Senate appropriators in July approved that level of spending. The European Space Agency and NOAA are identifying gaps in ground-based observations and space-borne surveillance not covered by ACE.

The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory spacecraft, a joint NASA-ESA project, also is studying the sun, particularly coronal mass ejections, which are emissions of plasma that Curry called "a big burp from the sun." In addition, imagery and measurements of charged particles from NASA's two Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory -- STEREO -- satellites are and will continue to supplement ACE.

ACE "is what's called a single point of failure. You either have it, or you don't have it. That's why there's an urgency," said Richard Fisher, head of NASA's heliophysics division. The space agency has developed four other spacecraft that provide NOAA with some weather data, but they can't match the accuracy or frequency of ACE's transmissions about earthbound solar storms.

"My No. 1 priority is to do everything possible to get a follow-on capability up there," Bogdan said.

Agencies also are working to churn out better intelligence with supercomputers. "Space weather is kind of where terrestrial weather was around 1960," Bogdan said. NOAA is developing a model scheduled to go live in 2012 that will display a 3-D picture of a storm three or four days ahead of impact. The physics of how meteorological storms propagate to Earth is similar to the kind of science NOAA applies to space storms. "We will in fact be using the same computers for our operational models that your weather comes from," Bogdan noted.

Scientists need better models of the physics of the sun, the solar plasma and the interaction of the plasma and the magnetic fields of the sun and the Earth, said Juha-Pekka Luntama, manager for space weather in ESA's Space Situational Awareness program. "Naturally, we also need supercomputers to run these models fast enough to make useful forecasts," she added. "The most accurate forecasts are of no use if they become available after the event has already happened."

Typically, it is difficult to communicate bad news up the chain of command in a federal agency but especially when leaders ask, "What are you talking about?" Fugate joked in June. "So, give me better data, give me longer warnings, give me better impacts, so we can go tell the story to the decision-maker -- so that if it does occur, it is an event, not a catastrophic disaster."