I wrote last year about the effect of CME on the thermospheric density and what are the effects on satellites inside the thermosphere, typically at the altitude of the Starlink satellites. You can find this post here. Solar cycle 25 is well underway now, and from the look of it, it looks like the sun is in a strong unrest. It might be a very active solar cycle, that some predictions made put it at the same level than the cycle 20, which peaked in the 70’s. Little known fact about the 20th solar cycle: one of the strongest storm …
Étiquette : CME
That Time When We Lost The Position Of Some Satellites
I wrote about Carrington events here, just a few days before the solar cycle 23 unleashed some strong storm with an X1 flare the 28th October and several other CMEs the next days… Fortunately, the impact on earth was minimal: It was a mostly a miss. But it sparked some wonderful display of aurora in the last days of October. See here and here for some nice images. Still, the storm had an impact in the sky, more precisely, on the satellites in orbit that had either some unwanted reboot, or even in some case, thrusters being spontaneously triggered. One …
The dangers of solar eruptions: the dreaded Carrington event
I am a fan of disaster movies. I have grown in the 90’s and 00’s, at a time where Hollywood started a trend of summer blockbusters that usually involved alien invasion, or volcanoes and other gigantic threat that was supposed to threaten the existence of Humanity. We had it all: Independence Day, Volcano, Armageddon, Deep Impact, 12 monkeys, etc… Spectacular and frightening. Most of these movies are special, in the sense that they depict events that are very unlikely to happen during our lifetimes. I mean volcanoes are a real threat, there is the whole super-volcano threat in the Yellowstone …