Extraído de
"Universe Today" (Space and Astronomy News):
Project Helianthus – a Solar Sail Driven
Geomagnetic Storm Tracker
4ANDY TOMASWICK
An illustration of the Light Sail 2 craft with its solar sails deployed. Image Credit: Josh Spradling/ The Planetary Society. Una ilustración de la nave Light Sail 2 con sus velas solares desplegadas. Crédito de la imagen: Josh Spradling/ The Planetary Society
Solar storms captured the imagination of much of the American public earlier this year when auroras were visible well south of their typical northern areas. As the Sun ramps into another solar cycle, those storms will become more and more common, and the dangers they present to Earth’s infrastructure will continue to increase. Currently, most of our early warning systems only give us a few minutes warning about a potentially destructive impending geomagnetic storm event. So a team of researchers from Sapienza University in Rome and the Italian Space Agency proposed a plan to sail a series of detectors to a point out in space where they could give us an early warning. And they want those detectors to stay on station without rockets.
The mission, known as Helianthus, the official name for a sunflower, was initially described at the 6th International Symposium on Space Sailing in June 2023. In a presentation, the Italian scientists explained the mission objective as providing different alarm levels for geomagnetic storms. But more importantly, the mission design would give humanity 100 minutes of warning for fast-moving solar storms, and a large solar sail would entirely control the mission.
Current warning times for solar storms are only a few minutes at best, as the detectors watching for them are located in Low Earth Orbit. To provide much earlier warning times, Helianthus would place a series of specially designed detectors at a point known as sub-L1 in the Sun/Earth system. While it’s unclear what exactly “sub-L1” means in this context, a typical Sun/Earth Lagrange point is about 1.5 million km toward the Sun—about four times as far away as the Moon is from Earth.
Las tormentas solares captaron la atención de la mayoría del público americano a principios de este año, cuando las auroras fueron claramente visibles más al sur de lo acostumbrado, ya que este fenómeno, como su propio nombre indica (aurora boreal) es más propio de nórdicas latitudes. Cuando el Sol entra en un nuevo ciclo, estas tormentas pueden llegar a ser más y más habituales, y los peligros que representan para nuestras infraestructuras tecnológicas y de comunicaciones continúan incrementándose. Actualmente, muchos de nuestros sistemas de alarma temprana solo nos conceden unos minutos de margen ante un potencialmente destructivo evento de tormenta geomagnética. Así, un equipo de investigadores de la Universidad Sapienza de Roma y de la Agencia Espacial Italiana propusieron un plan para lanzar al espacio una serie de detectores que podrían alertarnos con suficiente antelación. Y proponen además, que dichos detectores no necesitan cohetes para situarse en posición.
Enlace al artículo original:
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario