South Africa's Space Cube, "ZACUBE-1"

South Africa to Launch Mini Satellite for Space Weather Resesarch

A mini satellite weighing 1.2 kilograms will be launched from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) in November to collect information about space weather, it was learned on Wednesday.

Funded by the Department of Science and Technology, the satellite -- ZACUBE-1- will be South Africa's first nano- satellite running on the same amount of power used by a 5-watt light bulb, according to researchers at the CPUT.

Comparing ZACUBE-1 to Sputnik, the first satellite in the world to be launched into space in 1957, lead researcher Robert van Zyl described the nano-satellite as an evolutionary leap in space technology.

He said ZACUBE-1 cost much less and was 84 times smaller than Sputnik, tiny enough to be put on the palm of a human hand.

The satellite will travel to Russia and ultimately to space where the satellite will be released from its pod and its 10- meterantennae will be deployed to send information to receiving stations at CPUT and the town of Hermanus near Cape Town, according to the local newspaper Cape Times.

The satellite, also known as CubeSat, will be operational for between two and five years. Researchers expect the satellite to fall to the earth and burn up in about 10 to 20 years.

ZACUBE-1 is the result of 18 months of research and development by students and staff from the French South African Institute of Technology at CPUT, according to the report.

Doesn't say much though, about what kind of information about Space Weather it will be gathering.
     

New Euro Weather Satellite Sends 1st Image

MSG-3 Spins Out The Weather Report ...First Images
[SatNews] It scans Earth’s surface and atmosphere every 15 minutes in 12 different wavelengths, to track cloud development.

Today, the Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI) instrument on MSG-3 captured its first image of the Earth. This demonstrates that Europe’s latest geostationary weather satellite, launched on 5 July, is performing well and is on its way to taking over operational service after six months of commissioning.

The European Space Agency (ESA) was responsible for the initial operations after launch (the so-called launch and early orbit phase) of MSG-3 and handed over the satellite to EUMETSAT on 16 July.

The first image is a joint achievement by ESA, EUMETSAT, and the European space industry. For its mandatory programmes, EUMETSAT relies on ESA for the development of new satellites and the procurement of recurrent satellites like MSG-3. This cooperation model has made Europe a world leader in satellite meteorology by making best use of the respective expertise of the two agencies.

[...]

MSG-3 is the third in a series of four satellites introduced in 2002. These spin-stabilized satellites carry the primary Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager, or SEVIRI. The prime contractor for the MSG satellites is Thales Alenia Space, with the SEVIRI instrument built by Astrium.

SEVIRI delivers enhanced weather coverage over Europe and Africa in order to improve very short range forecasts, in particular for rapidly developing thunder storms or fog. It scans Earth’s surface and atmosphere every 15 minutes in 12 different wavelengths, to track cloud development.

SEVIRI can pick out features as small as a kilometer across in the visible bands, and three kilometres in the infrared. In addition to its weather-watching mission and collection of climate records, MSG-3 has two secondary payloads.

The Geostationary Earth Radiation Budget sensor measures both the amount of solar energy that is reflected back into space and the infrared energy radiated by the Earth system, to better understand climate processes. In addition, a Search & Rescue transponder will turn the satellite into a relay for distress signals from emergency beacons. [...]

New technology, and more data that should help improve weather prediction.
     

Japan: Before and After Satellite Photos

The tsunami's destruction: Before and after

If you follow the link, the site offers a series of photos with a scroll bar beneath, and the before picture is covered over with the after picture. The sheer enormity of the destruction boggles the mind.

Anxiety in Japan grows as death toll steadily climbs

Sendai, Japan (CNN) -- In a nation already besieged with grief over mounting casualties, fears of possible radiation and the threat of more earthquakes, thousands of bodies reportedly surfaced Monday, and a government official confirmed another explosion at a nuclear reactor building.

The official death toll reached 1,647 on Monday. But the numbers did not take into account the 2,000 bodies that Japan's Kyodo News said had been found in the hard-hit Miyagi Prefecture on Japan's northeast coast.

If confirmed, the discovery would be the largest yet of victims from the epic quake and devastating tsunami that hit Japan four days ago. [...]

     

Our recent Solar Weather continues

It really started getting interesting with the "Valentine's Day Flare":



Mega Solar Flare Fuels Earthly Disruption and Light Shows

A whopper of a solar flare that fired up earlier this week is wreaking havoc on some radio communications on Earth, and could spark exceptional auroras soon.

The class X solar flare – the most powerful kind of solar flare – spewed from the sun Monday (Feb. 14), unleashing a massive wave of charged particles speeding toward Earth. Now the flare has triggered a geomagnetic storm in our planet's magnetic field that interrupted radio communications in China and could disrupt satellites and power grids as well, AFP reported.

[...]

Monday's class X flare was the most powerful solar eruption in four years. It came on the heels of a few less powerful flares in the days before. [...]

The article has an embedded link, with video footage of the flare occurring.

I had read elsewhere that the number of sunspots had rapidly doubled in the days leading up to this. And particles from the CME will be continuing to hit the earth.

Catastrophe Looming? The Risks of Rising Solar Storm Activity

The sun let loose its most powerful eruption in more than four years Monday night (Feb. 14), disrupting radio communications in China and generating concern around the world. But it could have been a lot worse, experts say.

[...]

Solar flares are intense bursts of radiation that send waves of photons streaming toward Earth. The scale measuring their strength has three general categories – Class C, Class M and Class X – with Class X flares being the most powerful.

Monday's Valentine's Day solar flare registered a Class X2.2 on that scale.

Other storms, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), are large clouds of plasma and magnetic field that erupt from the sun's surface, sending lots of particles our way.

Both flares and CMEs have the same root cause — a disruption of the magnetic field in the sun's outer atmosphere. And both events can affect life here on Earth. Major flares, for example, can interfere with satellites, causing disruptions in GPS and high-frequency radio communications that can last from a few minutes to a few hours.

These impacts are felt almost immediately, since it only takes light about 8 minutes to travel from the sun to Earth.

"It's like the sun is a giant noise source," said Bob Rutledge, head of the forecast office at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center. "It can disrupt anything that depends on a link between the ground and satellites."

But the most severe damage comes from powerful CMEs. The particles from these outbursts take longer to reach us — up to three days or so. But when they get here, their interaction with Earth's magnetic field can cause massive "geomagnetic storms," which have the potential to wreak long-lasting havoc on power and communications infrastructure around the globe.

[...]

But Earth has been walloped by monster solar storms before. One of the most powerful hit us in 1859, a blast that Rutledge estimates may have been 30 times more powerful than Monday's event, though it's tough to put hard numbers on such comparisons.

The 1859 storm shorted out telegraph wires, causing fires in North America and Europe, and spawned spectacular auroras — the light shows visible near Earth's poles — bright enough to read by, according to some accounts.

If the 1859 storm occured these days, it would likely have devastating impacts, since our electrical and communications infrastructures are so much more developed. A recent report by the U.S National Academy of Sciences found that such a severe storm could cause up to $2 trillion in initial damages by crippling communications on Earth and fueling chaos around the world.

It might take up to 10 years for authorities to re-assert control and get everyting fixed, the report concluded. For comparison, Hurricane Katrina likely inflicted somewhere between $80 billion and $125 billion in damage. [...]

I recently posted about a theory that solar flares affect people and stimulate political rebellions. The rapid increase in sunspots and the occurrence of these flares sure is a coincidence with the rebellions in the Middle East.

And I have posted previously about the hazards of solar storms to our technology (see links below). In the past few decades we have added thousands of communication satellites, and adopted widespread use of new technologies (like GPS) that are very sensitive to solar weather. A storm that previously we would have considered not so big or dangerous, might now present more concerns than it used to. Some precautions are being taken, by hardening the electrical grid, but has enough been done? Let's hope we don't have to find out the hard way.


Also see:

Our growing reliance on satellite technology, and it's vulnerability to solar flares. Why it matters.

Solar activity and it's disruption of GPS functions

Solar Flare: The "Carrington Event" of 1859
     

Our growing reliance on satellite technology, and it's vulnerability to solar flares. Why it matters.

Electronic Armageddon? Congress Worries That Solar Flares Could Spell Disaster

High-energy electric pulses from the sun could surge to Earth and cripple our electrical grid for years, causing billions in damages, government officials and scientists worry.

The House is so concerned that the Energy and Commerce committee voted unanimously 47 to 0 to approve a bill allocating $100 million to protect the energy grid from this rare but potentially devastating occurrence.

The Grid Reliability and Infrastructure Defense Act, or H.R. 5026, aims "to amend the Federal Power Act to protect the bulk-power system and electric infrastructure critical to the defense of the United States against cybersecurity and other threats and vulnerabilities."

It cites electromagnetic pulses from geomagnetic or solar storms as the big threat to our energy distribution grid, and demands "an order directing the Electric Reliability Organization to submit … reliability standards adequate to protect the bulk-power system from any reasonably foreseeable geomagnetic storm event."

Solar storms occur when sunspots on our star erupt and spew out flumes of charged particles that can damage power systems. The sun's activity typically follows an 11-year cycle, and it looks to be coming out of a slump and gearing up for an active period.

"The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity," said Richard Fisher, head of NASA's Heliophysics Division. "At the same time, our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms." [...]

I've posted previously about EMP dangers, both man-made (military attack or terrorism) and naturally occurring (solar storms and flares). That congress has decided to protect our infrastructure from these threats is hopefully a good thing (that the money is spent wisely). But I would like to examine another aspect of this threat, that deserves special scrutiny; our growing dependence on satellite technology, and it's vulnerability to the sun.

The following link starts off describing the Quebec power failure of 1989, that was caused by a solar flare. The Quebec power grid had extensions reaching far North, where in inducted electricity from the flare. One of their main transformers was permanently damaged. What is even more alarming is, that the Northeast United states power grid was also almost collapsed, which would have resulted in 50 million Americans without power. The Quebec failure is now a textbook case as an example of the destructiveness of solar flares on modern power grids.

While the Quebec portion of the article is certainly worth reading, I'm going to excerpt a portion from the latter part of the article, that deals with satellite technology. It shows how our dependency on satellites has grown by leaps and bounds, and how it represents a new, growing vulnerability:

Chapter 1 : A Conflagration of Storms

[...] Why should we care that we are now once again living under 'sunspot maximum' conditions? After all, we have already weathered at least five of these solar activity cycles since the end of World War II. What is different about the world today is that we are substantially more reliant upon computers and telecommunications to run our commerce, and even our forms of entertainment and recreation. In 1981, at the peak of solar cycle 21, there were 15 communication satellites in orbit. Cellular phones were rare and there were 800,000 PCs sold in the U.S. with 300 hosts on the Internet. By the time the peak of solar cycle 22 came around in 1989, there were 102 communication satellites, and 3 million cellular phone users in the United States. With the new Intel 80486-based PCs, you could send e-mail to your choice of 300,000 host machines on the Internet.

As we arrive at the peak of the 23rd sunspot cycle in 2000-2001, however, we enter a very different world far more reliant on what used to be the luxuries of the Space Age. By 2000, 349 communication satellites orbit the Earth supporting over $60 billion of commerce. Over 100 million people have cellular phones, and Global Positioning System handsets are a commonplace for people working, or camping, 'off road'. By 2003, 400 million people will routinely use wireless data transmission via satellite channels. There will be over 10 million Internet hosts with 38% of US households Internet-connected.

[...]

As if to emphasize today's exuberance and expectations, 'Individual Investor' magazine announced on its cover 'The Sky's the Limit: In the 21st century satellites will connect the globe'. The International telecommunications Union in Geneva has predicted that by 2005, the demand for voice and data transmission services will increase to $1.2 trillion. The fraction carried by satellite services will reach a staggering $80 billion.

To meet this demand, many commercial companies are launching; not just individual satellites, but entire networks of them with names like 'Iridium', 'Teledesic', 'Skybridge' and 'SpaceWay'. The total cost of these systems alone represents a hardware investment of $35 billion between 1998 and 2004. The actual degree of vulnerability of these systems to solar storms is unknown, and will probably vary in a complex way depending on the kind of technology they use, and their deployment in space. They do, however, share some disturbing characteristics: They are all light-weight, sophisticated, built at the lowest cost, and following only a handful of design types replicated dozens and even hundreds of times, often with off-the-shelf electronics.

It is common to base future expectations on recent past experiences: "Past is prologue" some say. Increasingly, these past experiences with, for example, commercial space technology, do not extend back much beyond the last solar maximum in 1989-1990. So, when we wonder why infrequent events such as solar storms aren't more noticeable, we have to remind ourselves that most of our experience comes from times when the Sun was simply not very active, and when we were a lot less technologically vulnerable. [...]

So we can see a dramatic increase in satellite usage in the eleven year intervals in solar maximums. This article projected figures up until 2005. What is our satellite usage now? Here are some contemporary figures:

How many communications satellites were launched?

1,107 satellites provide civilian communications and 792 military communications. Some seven hundred of them were placed into geosynchronous orbit.

Civilian and military communications satellites represent the most numerous kind of spacecrafts launched.

(See lists of civilian Communications Satellites, of Military Communications Satelites and of Spacecrafts in Geostationary Orbit.)

Follow the link for detailed lists of those satellites.

If we consider non-communication satellites as well, the list gets longer:

How Many Satellites Are Orbiting the Earth?

Satellites are tracked by United States Space Surveillance Network (SSN), which has been tracking every object in orbit over 10 cm (3.937 inches) in diameter since it was founded in 1957. There are approximately 3,000 satellites operating in Earth orbit, according to the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), out of roughly 8,000 man-made objects in total. In its entire history, the SSN has tracked more than 24,500 space objects orbiting Earth. The majority of these have fallen into unstable orbits and incinerated during reentry. The SSN also keeps track which piece of space junk belongs to which country.

[...]

As space technology matured, satellites were launched for military and commercial purposes. The price of satellite launches has dropped to as low as a few million dollars for light satellites, and a few tens of millions for heavy satellites. This put satellite technology within the reach of many nations and international companies.

Satellites have an operating lifespan between five and 20 years. As of 2008, the former Soviet Union and Russia had nearly 1,400 satellites in orbit, the USA about 1,000, Japan more than 100, China about 80, France over 40, India more than 30, Germany almost 30, the UK and Canada 25, and at least ten each from Italy, Australia, Indonesia, Brazil, Sweden, Luxembourg, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea. [...]

So humankind is using and depending on satellite technology to a degree never seen before, and most of the growth of this usage has occurred in the past few decades.

We have gone from 15 communication satellites in 1981, to 1,899 communication satellites in 2010. We have yet to experience a severe solar storm, with all this satellite technology. Are we ready for it? Military satellites may be reinforced with extra shielding to withstand EMPs. But what about the many light-weight "cheap" satellites made with off the shelf parts? Are we ready to suddenly do without all this technology we've come to depend on, if many or most of these satellites get fried in a solar storm?


Related Links:

As the Sun Awakens, NASA Keeps a Wary Eye on Space Weather

National Geographic Explorer: "Electronic Armageddon"

Solar Storms Could Be Earth's Next Katrina

The Sun Also Flares
     

Our Satellite Weather Maps for Oregon

These are a few of my favorite things; satellite maps on the Accuweather.com website. I look a the state map most often:

Oregon Radar

Then the larger regional map:

Northwest Radar

Then sometimes, the even larger picture, to see where our weather is coming from, and what it's sending our way:

Infrared North East Pacific Satellite

With all this info at my fingertips, I can make my plans around the weather more reliably than just by going by what the weather forecast says. Most of our weather comes to us off of the ocean, so it really helps to see whats happening out there. Isn't technology wonderful!
     

NASA's reflective satellite: Echo I or Echo II?

I came across this photo recently, which I thought was pretty neat:


Look how tiny the people are in comparison. It was labeled "Echo 1" on site I got it from. It's one of the two Echo satellite series that NASA made in the 1960's. It's was basically a large reflective space balloon:

Following the failure of the Delta rocket carrying Echo 1 on May 13, 1960 Echo 1A (commonly referred to as just Echo 1) was successfully put in a 1,519 to 1,687 km (944 to 1,048 mi) orbit on August 12, 1960. The 30.5 meter (100 foot) diameter balloon was made of 0.127 mm (0.005 inch) thick metalized Mylar polyester film and was successfully used to redirect transcontinental and intercontinental telephone, radio, and television signals. The satellite also aided the calculation of atmospheric density and solar pressure due to its large area-to-mass ratio. As its shiny surface was also reflective in the range of visible light, Echo 1A was visible to the unaided eye over most of the Earth. Brighter than most stars, it was probably seen by more people than any other man-made object in space. Echo 1A reentered Earth's atmosphere and burned up on May 24, 1968.

Echo 1 was a passive communications satellite: it functioned as a reflector, not a transmitter. After it was placed in a low orbit of the Earth, a signal would be relayed to Echo, reflected or bounced off its surface, then returned to Earth. Echo 1 was visible to the eye because of its shiny surface, but also because of its low orbit; it would appear from below one side of the horizon, cross the sky, then disappear below the opposite horizon after crossing the sky, as happens with all LEO satellites. The spacecraft was nicknamed a 'satelloon' by those involved in the project.

I saw this photo in a magazine, where it was labled "Echo I", but this photo says 1965 in the file's name, so maybe it's "Echo II"? I've not been able to confirm it either way, but I still think it's a neat picture. I knew about the Echo satellites when I was a kid, but I didn't know they were inflatable balloons, and that they were so large.

There is another good photo at MSN's Encarta, which also has a photo of the smaller Telstar "active" communications satellite, which was made in 1962.
     

Broadband is Back! Hooray!

The Wildblue technician came out to the farm yesterday. It turned out the problem was simply algae. It had grown so thickly over the plastic cover of the eye of the satellite dish that it finally blocked the signal. We had a bit of rain just before we lost the signal, I suspect that caused a growth spurt that was the last straw.

I had tried to wipe it off prior to the service call, but it didn't come off, and I didn't want to scrub it hard. I asked the repairman if I should have, and he said it was not a good idea to apply too much pressure, because it could crack the plastic, which is soft and bendable.

He replaced the eye instead of cleaning it, and suggested that I climb a ladder up there every couple of months, and gently wipe the eye clean with a wet, soft cloth, before the algae has a chance to build up. So that's what I'm going to do.