Solar Storms Essay

According to a news release from NASA, coronal mass ejections caused by geomagnetic storms have been enhanced in strength; as from G1 to G5, they were rated G3 in 2012. The earth planet is surrounded and by bubbles of magnetic fields while rapid changes in the earth magnetosphere were witnessed due to activities that happened on sun that caused a geomagnetic storm. With earth’s magnetic fields, coronal mass ejections were mingled; as a result, the wind became mild in intensity reported in the month of March in the corresponding year (Philips, 2009).

The foremost differentiation between solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) is the scale on which they transpire. Solar flares are rather little and local, occuring in the low solar atmosphere, near sunspots, where magnetic field lines are concentrated. CMEs on the other hand are huge. They can even be bigger than the sun itself!

Despite the amounts of incoming radiation, very little actually reaches the Earth’s surface. One layer of protection the Earth provides is in the form of a magnetic field that deflects charged particles from reaching the Earth’s surface. This magnetic field is generated by a combination of the liquids within the Earth’s core and the interplanetary magnetic field generated by the Sun. This field reaches out thousands of miles from Earth, so when solar wind travels through space and encounters Earth’s

In the year 2065, climate change on Earth has spiraled out of control and nations are now fighting for new real estate in space to begin colonization. Mars had been a likely candidate for many years now and was becoming a massive fighting ground for numerous nations. However, it’s arid landscape and small size made it a questionable choice to some. More adventurous and risk-taking politicians urged their researchers to aim for Pluto or planets outside of our solar system. Feeling modern technology was not yet ready for such long distance travel, the United States has chosen to look toward the asteroid belt. As they are setting off, researchers will monitor sunspots to help forecast the behavior of the sun and predict coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Solar-powered sails will make use of solar wind for the early journey after leaving Earth. Radioisotope thermoelectric

Solar Storms, by Linda Hogan, is about a 17-year-old Native American girl named Angel who returns to her reservation after growing up in foster care. When she gets to Adam’s Rib, she wants to know about her past and searches for her grandmother. When she gets into town she realizes that the Native culture is more vibrant than she had imagined and realizes that she is home. Her grandmother tells her about what has happened to her and about her schizophrenic mother. Then she discovers that there is a plan to build a dam that will destroy burial sites. She joins with her community to fight the project, while reconnecting and coming to terms with her mentally ill mother and her identity as a Native American. The environmental justice movement can take many things away from this novel including the complexities of these movements and how to get people from all different walks of life involved.

This is why the Department of Defense should create a plan that will keep the cyber system functioning on a backup system and not rely so much on the main power grid. That way, members of the Department of Defense can see what the most critical components to the security system are and devise a plan to protect these elements against an EMP attack. Overall, the key to success for preparing to counter the effects of an EMP attack is to place obstacles against our enemies which would result in diminishing catastrophic failures in the nation’s infrastructure. With this method, the United States would provide resilience “to ensure the U.S. electrical grid and telecommunications systems, including having a developed limited redundancy and identified means for the timely replacement of essential damaged parts or their rapid substitution” (Carafano). Another way to protect the United States against an EMP attack would be for the Navy an Air Force “to develop a test program for land and sea-based interceptors with the capability to intercept and destroy ballistic missiles carrying EMP weapons prior to

Solar wind is a continuous stream of mostly of protons and electrons but also some atomic nuclei. It results from radiation pressure pushing parts of the corona into space and peaks during times of increased sunspot activity. Most of the solar wind is diverted around the Earth due to Earth’s magnetic field.

A hypnotizing video released by NASA yesterday shows stunning imagery of a plasma bursting from the Sun. The solar flare was so strong that it caused radio blackouts all across the earth. Did the space agency just stumble upon the gates of Heaven?

DHS is tasked with creating a national infrastructure protection plan for all critical infrastructure in the country. The plan is designed to ensure critical infrastructure is safe, secure and reliable enough to prevent, withstand or neutralize deliberate efforts by terrorist to exploit or destroy the power grid (Li et al., 2012). The plan also details procedures for strengthening national preparedness as well as providing timely responses to cyber-attacks. The goal of DHS is to ensure the power grid employs static methods in its operations that allow it to quickly respond and recover from a catastrophic event (Kuder et al., 2010).

Solar flares consist of both charged particles and electromagnetic radiation emitted from the sun. Solar flares are relatively smaller than a coronal mass ejection and emit both X-rays and Gamma rays. Travel time for a solar flare to reach the earth is much faster, arriving at our planet at around 8 minutes or the speed of light. The greater majority of solar flares go unnoticed here on earth due to the protective magnetic field surrounding our planet. During particular intense solar flares there is the possibility for satellites to be temporarily disrupted. Pilots and passenger flying at high altitudes are at greater risk of radiation exposure and can suffer mild short-term effects and with greater exposure longer term health risks are

Sunspots are disturbances that occur on the suns surface as a result of magnetic activity in the Sun’s interior. They appear as dark spots composed of a darker centre called the umbra that are surrounded by a lighter area called the penumbra.

2nd P: To understand the effects of solar plasma on Earth’s magnetosphere, one must look at the creation of plasma in the early days of the sun. The sun’s creation is similar to the process in the explosion of a hydrogen bomb, only with the energy created equaling the force of 10 billion hydrogen bombs per second. When the sun was originally forming, hydrogen gas in the middle was crushed from weight above. Eventually, the pressures and temperatures reached such an intense point to where the hydrogen atoms broke apart into electrons and photons, thus, creating plasma. Photons from the explosion of electrons and protons are made so fast and so many at a time that it creates the observed power of the sun. This reaches us as sunlight. Even though the process of the energy created is relatively quick, the process in which the photons travel to Earth happens over a long time within the Sun’s layers. The energy of sunlight that shines down on us today is over 100,000 years 1

NASA has a solar observatory called STEREO that can catch a CME the moment it erupts on the surface of the sun (4). STEREO can detect the direction and the intensity of the eruption. Since it takes several hours for a CME to hit the Earth, nations will have time to prepare to mitigate its effects.

The Sun is a hot ball of gas made of hydrogen. Most of its gas is in the fourth state of matter known as plasma, where the gas heats up to the point where atoms break up into plasma. The Sun’s plasma is so hot that it escapes the Sun’s gravitational field. This escape of plasma from the Sun is also known as Coronal Mass Ejection or CME. The escaped plasma forms the solar wind which blows out of the Sun and travels across the solar system with a speed of 500 Km/s, interacting with the planets’ magnetic field and atmosphere. These interactions result in the change of the planets, or in our case, the Earth’s magnetic field from the dipole magnetic field to a plasma-swept magnetosphere. The interactions also produce current to flow through the Earth’s upper atmosphere and the magnetosphere causing neon-light like effect resulting in the formation of aurora.[5]The Sun’s atmosphere also results in other effects such as prominences and solar flare. The solar flares eject high energy particles and gases which are about 13 million oC. These solar flares also cause strong space weather changes by producing a stream of highly energetic particles which impacts Earths magnetosphere.[6] Thus, these solar winds and solar flares are an

The Solar Maximum Mission or Solar Max was sent on February 14, 1980. This satellite was accompanied by a lot of scientific instruments, which provided new knowledge and coordinated observations about the nature of solar flares, especially during a period of maximum solar activity. The main purpose of the Solar Max was to investigate the solar phenomena by collecting data which was direct to the storage and release as flare energy, particle acceleration, formation of hot plasma, and mass ejection.