#space-weather

#space-weather

The UK is not well prepared for a severe space weather event, despite some investment in developing forecasting capabilities. The government does not yet understand the full range of possible impacts and cascading effects well.

Stellar activity such as solar storms and plasma turbulence from a star near a transmitting planet can broaden otherwise ultra-narrow signals. That spreads the power of any such transmission across more frequencies, the institute's scientists say, which makes it more difficult to detect using traditional narrowband searches.

The aeronautics company announced Friday that they have discovered a potential vulnerability in the software on board the Airbus A320 during solar storms, which may hinder pilots from steering or stabilizing the plane while in the air. Airbus issued an Alert Operators Transmission (AOT), a global warning that urges all airlines using the A320 passenger jet to immediately update their software and hardware to better protect against radiation interference.

NASA has drafted its Mars rover Perseverance to help monitor the sun's activity. Every day for the next two months, the rover will image the sun with its Mastcam-Z cameras, capturing crucial information about sunspots and other large features that can give clues to solar activity. Mars is currently passing behind the sun, giving the rover a view of the star's far sidea perspective we can't see from Earth.

UC Berkeley scientists are in charge of two identical satellites, nicknamed Blue and Gold to honor the university's colors, set to launch for Mars as soon as Sunday. Leading NASA's ESCAPADE mission, the team based at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory's mission operations center will manage the twin satellites as they take off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, this weekend and travel to Mars by 2027.

A G3 geomagnetic storm could interfere with power grid operations in the Mid-Atlantic, Northeast, and Midwest regions of the US, potentially causing power outages.