When you board a plane, the pilot already knows the weather on the flight path and can work around it, or at least warn you of approaching weather. The same cannot be said for “space weather” caused by solar phenomena, which can have serious effects on satellites and even passenger planes.
Mission Space is launching a constellation that will monitor this increasingly important phenomenon in near real time.
Space weather is a general term for radiation in the environment close to Earth. Outside of Earth's protective aura, satellites and spacecraft are exposed to the brunt of the sun's rays, and solar storms can disrupt or cripple them. The type and intensity of this radiation varies and flows in the same way as atmospheric weather, but it is invisible and travels at the speed of light, making it much harder to observe and predict.
Although there are many satellites and deep space missions that monitor solar radiation, they are necessarily limited. Imagine trying to predict the path of a storm using just a few wind and rain sensors scattered under the ocean. Historically, this was sufficient, but the growth of the new space economy has transformed space weather from an occasional inconvenience to a constant, quantifiable threat.
“More and more companies are putting space weather on their agenda,” said Alex Poe, CEO and founder of Mission Space. “We have 7,000 satellites in space, and in 10 years there will be 50,000. So space weather events will be the same as they are today, but the impact will be 10 times greater.”
Severe solar storms are dangerous not only to electronic equipment, but also to unprepared astronauts. If someone happens to be doing a spacewalk, their face could be full of radiation. If you want to establish a permanent presence on the Moon, where there is similarly little protection, you'll want to know exactly when it's safe to go outside. .
Closer to Earth's surface, airlines are worried that passengers will be exposed to large amounts of radiation during long flights over the poles, and some have canceled flights because of this. There are also a number of secondary effects for services that rely on satellites, such as precision agriculture.
Mission Space exhibits at TC Disrupt SF. CEO Alex Poe visited NASA. Image credit: Mission Space
Poe's startup, originally founded in Europe but now based in Israel and the United States, is among a constellation of 24 satellites that will monitor space weather and provide near real-time reports and forecasts. We are about to launch the first two.
It is not intended to replace the scientific instruments currently in space, but to augment that data (much of which is publicly available) with a large number of proprietary streams that will enable more accurate and timely monitoring. It is something to do.
Poe explained that while many companies and governments are increasingly recognizing the need for better space weather forecasting, satellites are aging, making it difficult to share data. .
“The infrastructure for space weather monitoring was developed in the late '90s, and many of the scientific models were developed 50 years ago,” Poe said. Information sharing agreements between organizations like NASA, NOAA, and ESA are complex, and the data itself is not easy to integrate and harmonize.
“There's no one within the companies that needs this data who can make sense of it. What we need is different alert levels for launches and airlines, for example. Everyone uses weather data, but No one thinks about how it is produced. They just want to know whether it will rain or not. Same here.
Mission Space is currently working on using public sources and normalizing them to create something like a unified data stream. However, they plan to launch the first two of their satellites in the first quarter of 2025, with more to follow later in the year. Poe said he could probably start sooner, but it would be more beneficial to learn from the first set and improve as he goes. “Engineers…” he said. “There are always more changes coming.”
Image credit: Mission Space
He noted that the satellites themselves (named Zohar) are special but not unique, which makes the 24-piece constellation cost less than expected. The important part is that we still collect 15 parameters 1,000 times per second.
“Space weather forecasting is a data monopoly game. The first person to launch a constellation and build the infrastructure will win,” he predicted. “Even with half as many constellations, in two years we will be generating 1,000 times more space weather data than humans have generated in the last 60 years. We will be able to develop the model.”
He argued that they are not competing with governments or scientific organizations, or even with the startups that are actually trying to serve those customers. Cooperation is needed for many reasons.
Their customers are “general aerospace.” Satellite operating companies and space tourism companies. Anyone working on a private space station. They are all very aware of this issue,” Poe said. “This used to be common knowledge in the aviation industry, but now companies are really looking at solutions. And of course for defense, they are developing this area, and critical space operations are seeing problems. They have to be confident that they don't. With the current level of accuracy, that's difficult for them.”
Real-time readings and predictions will have to wait for the entire constellation, but pairs rising in the coming months should provide a noticeable improvement over existing services. The exact release date has not been determined.