The European Space Agency’s Lagrange mission, together with a complementary US mission, will form the major elements of an early warning system for severe space weather, which can be hazardous to critical infrastructure on Earth and human life in space. Three out of the four multinational teams involved in the ESA project are UK-led, offering further evidence of the depth of scientific know-how the nation possesses with Brexit looming.
Professor Andrew Fazakerley, director of the UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory, which is developing precision instrumentation to measure the solar wind, said: “UCL has many years of research experience in the science of space weather and in building instruments with which to study it, including providing both solar and space plasma instruments for ESA’s upcoming Solar Orbiter mission due to launch in 2020.
“We are fortunate to be leading a very talented team of European institutes in developing one of two suites of instruments to support the ESA Lagrange mission, which, when placed in deep space, will give early warning of imminent, damaging space weather.
“This will allow us to better protect astronauts, satellites and ground infrastructure from disruptive space weather – something we’ve never been able to achieve before.”
The US mission will travel to a location known as Lagrange point L1 where it can monitor the Sun and solar wind in a direct line between the Sun and the Earth.
The ESA mission will go to a different location, known as Lagrange Point L5, where it can observe the Sun and the space in between the Sun and earth (the inner heliosphere), from a fixed viewpoint away from the sun-Earth line.
Together, the L1 and L5 missions will provide a 3D view that will greatly increase the accuracy of space weather forecasts.
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Space weather appears on the National Risk Register due to the damage that extreme events may cause to satellites, power distribution networks, air transportation, satellite navigation, telecommunications links and mobile phone networks.
The worst impacts can be avoided with sufficient warning, which the Lagrange mission will enable.
Last month the UK Government awarded £20million funding into research to improve forecasts, identify vulnerabilities and better prepare our infrastructure to cope with extreme space weather.
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Speaking on the sidelines of the UK Space Conference last month on the same day the extra cash was announced, Mike Willis, head of space safety with the UK Space Agency, said a sufficiently powerful solar storm could knock the National Grid offline and cause £5billion damage in the course of a few days.
He added: “What we are concerned about is the extreme events which would be much more than your normal flare. “This could actually cause serious disruption if we don’t forecast it and if we don’t do anything about it.
“The real effect that we are mostly concerned about is the impact on satellite navigation.
“It’s not an impact on the actual satellite, but it is the impact on the ionized area of the atmosphere that the signals have to pass through to get to us on the ground, and any turbulence in there could make the signals worst case not receivable for several hours to days and that would therefore mean satellite navigation would not work.
“Satellite navigation timing is used for a lot of other applications, so they are not good effects.
“There’s also the power grids – one of the impacts of space weather is to create geomagnetic activity which induces currents in long flexible conductors, and these are direct currents.
“So the National Grid is AC, or alternated current, and there are lots of transformers which can work between the very high voltage distribution eventually to our 240 volts.
“Now those transformers do not like having DC, or direct current, put through them so even a small amount of direct current through a transformer can cause it to overheat.
“So that’s a technical issue. Knowing when an event is coming allows the grid to take mitigation activities to prevent that, basically.
“With a good forecast we would be able to limit amount of damage to the grid.”
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