A blast of radiation
Published on Dec 8, 2006 at 2:40 pm.
2 Comments.
Filed under space weather.
Emily Lakdawalla posted on the Planetary Society Weblog about the Mars Odyssey spacecraft going into safe mode. As you may recall, that was what happened right at the end of the Mars Global Surveyor. The original notice itself was posted by Steve Squyres on the Athena web site. As they point out, spacecraft go into safe mode all the time, so this is not likely going mean the loss of Odyssey. In fact, they are programed to do this to protect themselve if anything unforseen goes wrong. And, this seems to be a response to the recent solar activity. A blast of particles from the Sun arrived just about the time that the spacecraft decided to go into safe mode.
Even though we are near solar minimum, the Sun has been acting up lately. One particular sunspot, Sunspot 930, has been blasting stuff from the Sun for some days now. Just a couple days ago it let loose an X9 flare. For those of you who don’t know, that is a very large one. In fact, Earth itself has been hit.  Just yesterday (and still hanging on today) we have been under a radiation storm warning. You can see the dramatic increase in radiation on the accompanying GOES 11 Proton Flux data. For the last couple of days, any passengers and airline crew flying at high altitudes have received elevated levels of radiation exposure (particularly yesterday).Â
I’ve written before about airline crew radiation exposure. If you want to monitor current space weather, then you can do it at the Space Environment Center’s web page, and they have a special page just for aviation.Â
-Astroprof
(Image courtesy of SOHO, Graph courtesy of SEC, GOES)
Andrew on December 8, 2006 at 6:05 pm: 1
Sunspot 930 is gigantic.I would estimate it as being slightly larger than sunspot 923.
The new spot has burped out some M-class flares as well.Although these flares are not as powerful as X-class flares,they do have the potential to cause HF radio blackouts in the polar regions.Either way,we could be in for some Northern light activity?!.
A Ler…-- Rastos de Luz on December 9, 2006 at 11:15 am: 2
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