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SUNSPOT NUMBERS ARE BOUNCING BACK: After a two week decline, which reminded some observers of Solar Minimum, sunspot numbers are bouncing back. The emergence of multiple new sunspots on the solar disk plus a new farside sunspot rotating over the sun's eastern limb is driving the sunspot number back up to 100. This is a normal fluctuation en route to Solar Max. Solar flare alerts: SMS Text
20 YEARS LATER, THE HALLOWEEN STORMS: Imagine waking up to this headline: "Half of Earth’s Satellites Lost!" Impossible? It actually happened during the Great Halloween Storms of 2003.
Turn back the clock 20 years. Solar Cycle 23 was winding down, and space weather forecasters were talking about how quiet things would soon become. Suddenly, the sun unleashed two of the strongest solar flares of the Space Age--an X17 flare on Oct. 28 followed by an X10 on Oct 29, 2003. Both hurled fast CMEs directly toward Earth.
A CME heading straight for Earth on Oct. 28, 2003. The source was an X17-flare in the magnetic canopy of giant sunspot 486. Image credit: SOHO. Movie
Traveling 2125 km/s and 1948 km/s, respectively, each CME reached Earth in less than a day, sparking extreme (G5) geomagnetic storms on Oct. 29, 30, and 31, 2003. Auroras descended as far south as Georgia, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and Oklahoma: photo gallery.
Onboard the International Space Station, astronauts took shelter in the hardened Zvezda service module to protect themselves from high energy particles. Meanwhile, airline pilots were frantically changing course. Almost every flight over Earth’s poles detoured to lower latitudes to avoid radiation, costing as much as $100,000 per flight. Many Earth-orbiting satellites experienced data outages, reboots and even unwanted thruster firings. Some operators simply gave up and turned their instruments off.
There’s a dawning awareness that something else important happened, too. Many of Earth's satellites were "lost"--not destroyed, just misplaced. In a 2020 paper entitled "Flying Through Uncertainty," USAF satellite operators recalled how "the majority of satellites (in low Earth orbit) were temporarily lost, requiring several days of around-the-clock work to reestablish their positions."
Active sunspot 486 was the source of the 2003 Halloween storms
How did this happen? The Halloween storms pumped an extra 3 Terrawatts of power into Earth’s upper atmosphere. Geomagnetic heating puffed up the atmosphere, sharply increasing aerodynamic drag on satellites. Some satellites in low-Earth orbit found themselves off course by one to tens of kilometers.
Most satellite operators today have never experienced anything like the Halloween storms. That's a problem because the number of objects they need to track has sharply increased. Since 2003, the population of active satellites has ballooned to more than 7,000, with an additional 20,000+ pieces of debris larger than 10 cm. Losing track of so many objects in such a congested environment could theoretically trigger a cascade of collisions, rendering low Earth orbit unusable for years following an extreme geomagnetic storm.
Now that’s scary.
more images: from Andreas Walker of Rossbüchel, Switzerland, Europe
Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery
Free: Spaceweather.com Newsletter
MR. SPOCK CHRISTMAS ORNAMENT: It's the logical way to decorate your Christmas tree--with a rare Mr. Spock ornament. This one has been to the edge of space. On Sept. 22nd, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus launched Spock to the stratosphere on board a cosmic ray research balloon:
You can have it for $129.95. The students are selling Spock ornaments to pay the helium bill for their cosmic ray ballooning program. Made by Hallmark in the 1990s, the ornament comes with a greeting card showing the science officer in flight and telling the story of its trip to the stratosphere and back again.
Far Out Gifts: Earth to Sky Store
All sales support hands-on STEM education
Realtime Aurora Photo Gallery
Free: Spaceweather.com Newsletter
Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery
Free: Spaceweather.com Newsletter
Every night, a network of
NASA all-sky cameras scans the skies above the United States for meteoritic fireballs. Automated software maintained by NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office calculates their orbits, velocity, penetration depth in Earth's atmosphere and many other characteristics. Daily results are presented here on Spaceweather.com.
On Oct 29, 2023, the network reported 11 fireballs.
(9 sporadics, 1 October beta Camelopardalid, 1 Orionid)
In this diagram of the inner solar system, all of the fireball orbits intersect at a single point--Earth. The orbits are color-coded by velocity, from slow (red) to fast (blue). [Larger image] [movies]
Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (
PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding
new ones all the time.
On October 31, 2023 there were 2349 potentially hazardous asteroids.
 |
Recent & Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters: | Asteroid | Date(UT) | Miss Distance | Velocity (km/s) | Diameter (m) |
| 2023 TG14 | 2023-Oct-26 | 4.2 LD | 6.7 | 25 |
| 2023 UJ2 | 2023-Oct-26 | 11.8 LD | 3.2 | 49 |
| 2023 TR7 | 2023-Oct-26 | 19.3 LD | 11.4 | 30 |
| 2021 SZ4 | 2023-Oct-26 | 14 LD | 30 | 289 |
| 302169 | 2023-Oct-26 | 12.7 LD | 25.7 | 374 |
| 2023 UO7 | 2023-Oct-27 | 1.1 LD | 13.8 | 8 |
| 2023 UV6 | 2023-Oct-27 | 10.3 LD | 7.3 | 18 |
| 2023 UK4 | 2023-Oct-27 | 11.7 LD | 11.3 | 17 |
| 2023 UA2 | 2023-Oct-29 | 12.9 LD | 9.2 | 15 |
| 525229 | 2023-Oct-30 | 10.6 LD | 17.4 | 200 |
| 2023 TW6 | 2023-Oct-31 | 19.2 LD | 24.4 | 91 |
| 2013 UV3 | 2023-Nov-01 | 14.7 LD | 15.4 | 15 |
| 2023 UZ3 | 2023-Nov-01 | 2.7 LD | 14.4 | 19 |
| 2016 WY | 2023-Nov-02 | 9.1 LD | 3.9 | 5 |
| 363505 | 2023-Nov-02 | 13.7 LD | 8 | 709 |
| 2023 UY3 | 2023-Nov-02 | 14 LD | 3.7 | 15 |
| 2022 JF | 2023-Nov-03 | 15.2 LD | 17.2 | 39 |
| 2023 QP8 | 2023-Nov-03 | 17.1 LD | 8.8 | 180 |
| 2016 VW2 | 2023-Nov-03 | 10.1 LD | 8.1 | 20 |
| 2019 UH7 | 2023-Nov-04 | 9.9 LD | 5.9 | 11 |
| 2023 TL31 | 2023-Nov-04 | 8.1 LD | 9.2 | 28 |
| 2023 UG4 | 2023-Nov-06 | 6.5 LD | 3.5 | 17 |
| 2023 TO15 | 2023-Nov-06 | 15.2 LD | 11.2 | 48 |
| 2023 TD14 | 2023-Nov-08 | 9.3 LD | 6.3 | 24 |
| 2023 UQ4 | 2023-Nov-11 | 10.7 LD | 8.4 | 38 |
| 2023 TZ2 | 2023-Nov-12 | 19 LD | 2.8 | 24 |
| 2014 BA3 | 2023-Nov-13 | 15.7 LD | 2.7 | 8 |
| 2023 UO | 2023-Nov-15 | 6.4 LD | 6.8 | 36 |
| 2021 TN3 | 2023-Nov-15 | 17 LD | 6.3 | 31 |
| 2019 VL5 | 2023-Nov-16 | 8.5 LD | 8.2 | 24 |
| 2019 LB1 | 2023-Nov-18 | 15.8 LD | 4.2 | 14 |
| 2016 DK1 | 2023-Nov-19 | 5.3 LD | 6.8 | 12 |
| 2022 VR1 | 2023-Nov-19 | 8.1 LD | 6.1 | 39 |
| 2019 UT6 | 2023-Nov-24 | 9 LD | 13.2 | 141 |
| 2019 CZ2 | 2023-Nov-25 | 2.8 LD | 5.8 | 44 |
| 2013 UB3 | 2023-Nov-27 | 18.5 LD | 5.4 | 25 |
| 1998 WB2 | 2023-Dec-03 | 11 LD | 14.2 | 151 |
| 2013 VX4 | 2023-Dec-04 | 5.1 LD | 6.6 | 60 |
| 2023 TB27 | 2023-Dec-06 | 17.1 LD | 4.3 | 46 |
| 139622 | 2023-Dec-06 | 14.4 LD | 6.7 | 719 |
| 2020 HX3 | 2023-Dec-10 | 9.8 LD | 15.7 | 13 |
| 2010 XF3 | 2023-Dec-11 | 19.4 LD | 4 | 46 |
| 2016 XD2 | 2023-Dec-19 | 18.7 LD | 6.9 | 59 |
| 341843 | 2023-Dec-20 | 16.5 LD | 5.3 | 344 |
| 2018 YJ2 | 2023-Dec-21 | 18.4 LD | 13.1 | 154 |
| 2022 YG | 2023-Dec-22 | 10.8 LD | 5.1 | 17 |
| 2020 YO3 | 2023-Dec-23 | 3.6 LD | 16.6 | 42 |
| 2010 UE51 | 2023-Dec-24 | 9 LD | 1.3 | 7 |
| 2020 YR2 | 2023-Dec-25 | 13.8 LD | 8 | 8 |
Notes: LD means "Lunar Distance." 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distance between Earth and the Moon. 1 LD also equals 0.00256 AU. | | Cosmic Rays in the Atmosphere |
SPACE WEATHER BALLOON DATA: Almost once a week, Spaceweather.com and the students of Earth to Sky Calculus fly space weather balloons to the stratosphere over California. These balloons are equipped with sensors that detect secondary cosmic rays, a form of radiation from space that can penetrate all the way down to Earth's surface. Our monitoring program has been underway without interruption for 7 years, resulting in a unique dataset of in situ atmospheric measurements.
Latest results (July 2022): Atmospheric radiation is decreasing in 2022. Our latest measurements in July 2022 registered a 6-year low:
What's going on? Ironically, the radiation drop is caused by increasing solar activity. Solar Cycle 25 has roared to life faster than forecasters expected. The sun's strengthening and increasingly tangled magnetic field repels cosmic rays from deep space. In addition, solar coronal mass ejections (CMEs) sweep aside cosmic rays, causing sharp reductions called "Forbush Decreases." The two effects blend together to bring daily radiation levels down.
.Who cares? Cosmic rays are a surprisingly "down to Earth" form of space weather. They can alter the chemistry of the atmosphere, trigger lightning, and penetrate commercial airplanes. According to a study from the Harvard T.H. Chan school of public health, crews of aircraft have higher rates of cancer than the general population. The researchers listed cosmic rays, irregular sleep habits, and chemical contaminants as leading risk factors. A number of controversial studies (#1, #2, #3, #4) go even further, linking cosmic rays with cardiac arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death.
Technical notes: The radiation sensors onboard our helium balloons detect X-rays and gamma-rays in the energy range 10 keV to 20 MeV. These energies span the range of medical X-ray machines and airport security scanners.
Data points in the graph labeled "Stratospheric Radiation" correspond to the peak of the Regener-Pfotzer maximum, which lies about 67,000 feet above central California. When cosmic rays crash into Earth's atmosphere, they produce a spray of secondary particles that is most intense at the entrance to the stratosphere. Physicists Eric Regener and Georg Pfotzer discovered the maximum using balloons in the 1930s and it is what we are measuring today.
| | The official U.S. government space weather bureau |
| | The first place to look for information about sundogs, pillars, rainbows and related phenomena. |
| | Researchers call it a "Hubble for the sun." SDO is the most advanced solar observatory ever. |
| | 3D views of the sun from NASA's Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory |
| | Realtime and archival images of the Sun from SOHO. |
| | information about sunspots based on the latest NOAA/USAF Active Region Summary |
| | current counts of failed and deployed Starlink satellites from Jonathan's Space Page |
| | Authoritative predictions of space junk and satellite re-entries |
| | from the NOAA Space Environment Center |
| | fun to read, but should be taken with a grain of salt! Forecasts looking ahead more than a few days are often wrong. |
| | from the NOAA Space Environment Center |
| | the underlying science of space weather |
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