Inviting us on a journey through a solar storm

When storms rage around the sun, here on earth we get the beautiful northern lights, also known as aurora borealis. But we also get disruptions of our power grids, satellites, GPS and air traffic systems. The American space agency NASA wants to take a closer look and they have entrusted Martin Törnros, media technology student at Linköping University, with the job.

Photo: Åke Hjelm

“I‘m building a tool that will visualise space weather, both for NASA experts and the audience at the Hayden Planetarium in New York,” says Martin, who is doing his master’s dissertation at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, not far from Washington DC.

This interview took place over the telephone the day before the terrestrial Hurricane Sandy slammed into to east coast of the United States. All government activity had been suspended as major power cuts were anticipated. A well developed warning system meant that they had a pretty good idea of what to expect.

In the same way we want to be able to predict the consequences of a solar storm, a massive eruption on the surface of the sun which sends charged particles out into the solar system. If they head towards the Earth, they can produce major disturbances in the magnetic field that surrounds our planet.

At Goddard, a group of space physicists are working to capture and analyse data from such cosmic events. In 2012 two unusually powerful solar storms were recorded by the satellites Stereo A and Stereo B, which are stationed in orbit around the earth. They provided large amounts of data for a three-dimensional mathematical model that will provide the basis of the visualisation model.

“I am working with two different models, one for the Earth’s magnetic field and the other for the solar storms themselves. Putting the two together is tricky as there is an unbelievable difference in scale - three times the radius of the earth compared with ten times the distance from the sun to the earth,” says Martin.

Spectators will experience the illusion of flying slowly through the solar storm in both time and space. Hopefully visitors to Visualisation Center C in Norrköping will also eventually get the chance to experience the same journey.

The Goddard Space Flight Center is something of a boy’s dream. It has over 10,000 people working on developing and operating unmanned scientific space vessels and systems, including the famous Hubble telescope.

“In the building next door to where I work, all the satellites are tested in an enormous centrifuge before they are sent up,” Törnros explains.

He expects to be finished with his work in March 2013, and is looking forward to being in one place in Sweden after spending a long time living out of a backpack, first in Ireland and now in the USA. But before this he will go on a big trip around Canada.

Text: Åke Hjelm
LiU Magasin 4-2012

Related links
Meet Ronny, Julia and Martin - Swedish students at NASA (news published by the Swedish American Chambers of Commerce USA)