t's not often that a scientific discipline gains a 23-satellite constellation overnight. Although today, space weather experts are reaping such a windfall, as the Mis Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico released of sixteen years of radiation measurements recorded by GPS geostationary satellites.
Although billions of men and women internationally use data from GPS NAVIGATION satellites, they remain Circumstance. S. military assets. Experts have long sought the info made by sensors used to monitor the position of the satellites, which operate in the heavy radiation of medium-Earth orbit and can be prone to solar storms. Nevertheless few have been allowed to tap this useful resource. "There's a general hesitancy to broadcast even pretty innocuous things out to the broad community, inch says Marc Kippen, a program manager at Mis Alamos, which developed the radiation-measuring instruments.
That frame of mind changed in October 2016, when the outgoing Obama administration issued an acting order aimed at planning the nation for extreme space weather. Such bursts in charged particles, originating in a solar flare or coronal mass ejection, could disable the electrical electric power grid or divert plane tickets away from the Arctic, where radiation exposure is heightened.
The GPS data, which dates from January 2000, fill a pit in studies of space weather, the complex interaction of Earth's magnetic field with bombarding radiation from cosmic rays and the sun. These satellites operate exposed to the Lorrie Allen belts, two doughnuts of highly energetic rays wrapped up in Globe's magnetism. Although purpose-built spacecraft, like NASA's Van Allen probes, have studied the belt, nothing can defeat the Global positioning system for the frequency and duration of its observations, according to Steven Morley, a Mis Alamos researcher.
For example, Morley and his friends have used data from seven satellites to trail a steep loss in the flow of enthusiastic electrons, throughout a May 3 years ago solar wind, in less than 2 hours. "Faster than anyone thought the losses could happen, inches he says. They proceeded to go on to show that a certain kind of solar wind, called a "corotating interaction region, inches can predictably be shown to supercharge the light belt. The data, which measure electrons and protons, have also been proven to match well with existing purpose-built instruments, this individual adds. "We've shown we are going to measuring the overall picture to high fidelity. very well
This release should be emulated by other nations around the world as they invest in space-based navigation systems, says Delores Knipp, a magnetosphere researcher at the School of Colorado in Boulder and the editor of Space Weather, which released an explanation of the GPS instruments today. Having such data, she gives, "is crucial to learning how these particles impact our upper atmosphere all the way down to aviation altitudes. "
The GPS data, available by searching for "GPS dynamic particles" on data. gov, get their limits. In particular, they can't inform the direction of the particles striking them. Nevertheless the Los Alamos team dreams scientists will use the data to develop better models for predicting solar thunder or wind storms.
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