Question

ESSAY ON SPACE WEATHER 400 WORDS MINIMUM

Answer 1

Everyone is familiar with changes in the weather on Earth. But "weather" also occurs in space. Just as it drives weather on Earth, the sun is responsible for disturbances in our space environment.

Besides emitting a continuous stream of plasma called the solar wind, the sun periodically releases billions of tons of matter in what are called coronal mass ejections. These immense clouds of material, when directed towards Earth, can cause large magnetic storms in the space environment around Earth, the magnetosphere and the upper atmosphere.

The term space weather generally refers to conditions on the sun, in the solar wind, and within Earth's magnetosphere, ionosphere and thermosphere that can influence the performance and reliability of space-borne and ground-based technological systems and can endanger human life or health

Space weather is monitored at ground level by observing changes in the Earth's magnetic field over periods of seconds to days, by observing the surface of the Sun and by observing radio noise created in the Sun's atmosphere.

The Sunspot Number (SSN) is the number of sunspots on the Sun's photosphere in visible light on the side of the Sun visible to an Earth observer. The number and total area of sunspots are related to the brightness of the Sun in the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) and X-ray portions of the solar spectrum and to solar activity such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs).

A host of research spacecraft have explored space weather.^{[49][50][51][52]} The Orbiting Geophysical Observatory series were among the first spacecraft with the mission of analyzing the space environment. Recent spacecraft include the NASA-ESA Solar-Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) pair of spacecraft launched in 2006 into solar orbit and the Van Allen Probes, launched in 2012 into a highly elliptical Earth-orbit. The two STEREO spacecraft drift away from the Earth by about 22° per year, one leading and the other trailing the Earth in its orbit. Together they compile information about the solar surface and atmosphere in three dimensions. The Van Allen probes record detailed information about the radiation belts, geomagnetic storms and the relationship between the two.

Some spacecraft with other primary missions have carried auxiliary instruments for solar observation. Among the earliest such spacecraft were the Applications Technology Satellite^[53] (ATS) series at GEO that were precursors to the modern Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) weather satellite and many communication satellites. The ATS spacecraft carried environmental particle sensors as auxiliary payloads and had their navigational magnetic field sensor used for sensing the environment.