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The United Nations Braces for Stormy Space Weather
- presented by Science@NASA
Rewind to the late 1950s:
The Soviet Union had just launched the first artificial satellite,
Sputnik.
The United States,
caught short,
was scrambling to catch up,
kick-starting a Cold War space race
that would last for decades.
Space was up for grabs,
and it seemed like anything could happen.
Into this void stepped the United Nations.
In 1958, the General Assembly
'recognizing the common interest of mankind
in furthering the peaceful use of outer space ...
and desiring to avoid the extension of national rivalries
into this new field...'
established the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.
COPUOS became a forum for development of laws
and treaties governing space-related activities,
setting the stage for international cooperation
on problems that no one nation could handle alone.
As the years went by,
COPUOS membership ballooned from 18 to 74 nations,
while items such as orbital debris,
near-Earth asteroids,
and global navigation were added to the regular agenda.
At each meeting,
members confer about these issues,
which present some key challenge or peril to the whole planet.
This year, a new item is on the agenda:
space weather.
'This is a significant development,'
says Lika Guhathakurta of NASA Headquarters in Washington.
'By adding space weather to the regular agenda
of the COPUOS Science and Technical Subcommittee,
the UN is recognizing solar activity as a concern
on par with orbital debris and close-approaching asteroids.'
Space weather is the outer-space equivalent of weather on Earth.
Instead of wind, rain and snow, however,
space has radiation storms, solar wind, flares
and coronal mass ejections.
The source of space weather is the sun,
and although solar storms are launched 93 million miles from Earth,
they can make themselves felt on our planet.
'Strong solar storms can knock out power
and disable satellites,' says Guhathakurta.
'It's a global problem
made worse by our increasing reliance
on sensitive electronic technologies.'
The potential economic impacts of space weather are significant.
For instance, modern oil and gas drilling
frequently involve directional drilling
to tap deep oil and gas reservoirs.
This drilling technique
depends on accurate positioning using GPS.
Drill heads could go awry, however,
if the sun interferes with GPS reception.
Solar energetic particles
at the magnetic poles
can force the re-routing of international airline flights
resulting in delays and increased fuel consumption.
Currents generated by magnetic storms
can damage transformers
and increase corrosion in energy pipelines.
A key problem that the UN can help solve
is the gaps in storm coverage around our planet.
When a solar storm sweeps past Earth,
waves of ionization ripple through Earth's upper atmosphere
and the whole planet's magnetic field begins to shake.
'These are global phenomena,' says Guhathakurta.
'We need to be able to monitor them all around the world.'
Industrialized countries
tend to have an abundance of monitoring stations.
Developing countries are where the gaps are.
With assistance from the UN,
researchers may be able to extend sensor networks
into regions where it was once politically impossible.
Space weather might play a role in Earth's climate, too.
For example, the Maunder minimum,
a 70-year period almost devoid of sunspots
in the late 17th to early 18th century,
coincided with very cold winters in the northern hemisphere.
Researchers are increasingly convinced
that variations in solar activity have regional effects on climate
that pay no attention to national boundaries.
From now on,
space weather will be a matter of regular conversation among UN diplomats
and emergency planners.
This is important because,
while space is no longer up for grabs,
it is still true almost anything can happen.
For more news about space weather and its global effects,
visit science.nasa.gov