Extreme solar storm only a matter of time

A DEVASTATING solar storm that could wipe out communications on Earth and fry power grids is a matter of “when not if ” the head of the Met Office’s space weather monitoring centre has warned.

Extreme space weather has already caused widespread disruption, with a geomagnetic storm leaving six million people without power in 1989, while Apollo astronauts narrowly missed being exposed to deadly radiation in 1972, and solar flares in 2003 forced the crew of the International Space Station to take cover. The largest solar storm ever recorded, the Carrington Event in 1859, knocked out telegraph systems and even set fire to paper in offices.

To help forecast such devastating phenomena, the European Space Agency is launching the Solar Orbiter probe in 2020 to monitor the Sun, and yesterday it unveiled the spacecraft at Airbus’s base ahead of testing in Germany.

Catherine Burnett, head of the Met Office’s unit said: “Solar Orbiter is a research mission, which in the long term will help us to understand much more about the Sun and why it behaves as it does, so in the future it should help us spot disrupting events so that we can prepare for them.

“We think that the big solar incidents, such as the Carrington Event, happen between one in 100 and one in 200 years so it is a case of ‘when not if ’ we have one.”