believes that NASA can take steps to protect solar storms . This type of event, during which a shower of high energy particles hit our planet causing outages and all kinds of electrical disturbances could be provided with sufficient time to take steps to minimize their effects. A warning system consisting of the SOHO spacecraft and NASA's twin STEREO allow us to make a 3D model the phenomenon and off-critical systems before they are affected.
Statistics show that occurs every hundred years a solar storm powerful enough to stain the skies of Earth with stunning blood-red auroras. Unfortunately, this type of phenomenon is not limited to producing scary visual spectacles, but affects the operation of compasses and satellite outage occurs, it interferes with telecommunications networks, affecting nearly all electronic equipment that our civilization uses every day.
Fortunately, most solar storms are not large enough to cause effects "to Hollywood," but some of them could really get us into trouble.
A report issued by the National Academy of Sciences of the United States in 2008 warned that if a solar storm " important "were to occur in the present, we would experience widespread power outages, and even be damaged many of the main transformers used in power distribution networks supply. To avoid this, NASA is working on a project called "Sun Shield" ("Solar Shield"), to alert the electricity distribution companies about the possibility of such an event in time to perform preventive disconnection of their systems.
According Antti Pulkkinen, a researcher at the Catholic University of America who work at Goddard Space Flight Center of NASA, "Solar Shield is a security system, new and experimental applied to the distribution network North American Electric. We believe it can be useful for specific processors time off from predicting which of them could be affected by solar storms. "
The cause of the malfunction of electrical networks during these events has its origin in a effect known as GIC (Geomagnetically Induced Current "or" geomagnetically induced current). When the cloud of solar particles generated during a storm hits the Earth's magnetic field makes it begins to "tremble." These vibrations induce magnetic currents in all regions of the atmosphere, overloading circuits, switches and, in extreme cases, melting the coils of the transformers.
Pulkkinen says that "Sun Shield" is now an experimental system that has never been tested during a geomagnetic storm real. Several distribution companies have installed monitors at key locations of their networks to support the NASA team in their predictions. As in recent years solar activity has been small and only a few storms have been relatively slightly over the past year, the system has not been thoroughly tested. "We wish more energy-related companies from joining our research team," says Pulkkinen. "The more data we get, the quicker we can try and improve Solar Shield." The next peak of solar storms, which have a periodicity of approximately 11 years is expected sometime in 2012 or 2013 , so that implementation of this project may be crucial.
