Latest news with #CIRBE
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Science
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'It was a miracle.' Amazing tales of dead spacecraft that came back to life
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The hulk of metal moved silently through space, high above the blue Earth. Power no longer coursed through its wires, its instruments were dead to the outside universe, and its communications antenna was silent. To all intents and purposes it was deceased, and almost everyone back home had given up on it. Almost everyone. Despite the last vestiges of its battery having been drained, suddenly, from somewhere, there was a spark of life. As a failsafe, its computer was tasked with rebooting the spacecraft once the battery was empty — there was always more energy to garner from its solar arrays. Suddenly, the small satellite's various sub-systems began waking up. The flight computer reactivated, reaction wheels began spinning, instruments began sensing and its radio antenna began broadcasting once more. We were all jubilant! It was a miracle." CIRBE (Colorado Inner Radiation Belt Electron Experiment) was a 3-unit cubesat thatlaunched in April 2023 to monitor charged particles in the inner Van Allen radiation belt. It was so successful that NASA granted it an extension after its nominal 4-month mission ended, but on April 15 something happened to the little satellite as it circled 316 miles (509 kilometers) above our heads. It went dark. And that, everybody thought, was that. 'We were all disappointed – we could only think positively that our high-energy resolution measurements had provided a lot of high-quality data," Xinlin Li, CIRBE's lead investigator at the University of Colorado at the time, told in an interview. Then the May 2024 solar storms erupted from the sun, a torrent of charged particles slamming into the Earth's magnetic field to generatean almighty geomagnetic storm and modify the Van Allen belts, which was just the kind of thing CIRBE had been designed to measure. And yet, CIRBE wasn't around. As auroral lights shimmered across skies all over the world on the night of May 10, Li's friends and colleagues ventured outside to view the celestial light show. But not Li. Knowing what they were missing from not having CIRBE around to monitor the storm's effects, Li felt his spirits drop. "I just wasn't in the mood to go and watch the aurora," he said. Instead, every day he checked the SatNog website that provided live satellite telemetry, willing CIRBE back to life. His hopes were not completely unfounded. CIRBE's sister mission from the decade prior was CSSWE, the Colorado Student Space Weather Experiment. It launched in 2012 before falling silent on March 13, 2013 for three months before coming back to life. In the case of CSSWE, however, it was a known problem in its communication system that caused the radio blackout, and a built-in "Phoenix mode" allowed it to reboot once the battery had drained. However, whatever ailment had afflicted CIRBE was, and still is, a mystery. Li's best guess is that it was some kind of corruption in the spacecraft's flash memory, and Li could only hope that the satellite would reboot. Then, on May 23, out of the blue Li saw a signal from CIRBE. "It came back to life for two-and-a-half days before falling silent again,"Li said. "We still don't know why." Li wasn't giving up hope, and on June 10 CIRBE phoned home once more, and this time it was back to stay. Well, that is until its orbit decayed and it reentered the atmosphere on Oct. 4, burning up in a blaze of glory. "We were all jubilant!" said Li of CIRBE's return to active duty. "It was a miracle." Alas, the miracle could not last. The solar storms were heating Earth's upper atmosphere, causing it to inflate and increase the atmospheric drag on the cubesat. This is what eventually spelled its doom — the very thing that CIRBE was sent up there to study. "Every time we encountered an intense magnetic storm it was a bittersweet feeling," said Li. "We observed dynamic features in the radiation belts and captured new phenomena, but at the same time we watched as CIRBE's altitude dipped quickly during each storm." At least CIRBE came back from the dead quickly enough to discover two new and temporary radiation belts formed by an influx of charged particles from the solar storms, located in the "slot" region between the two Van Allen belts. Some missions have been known to spend years hovering between life and death before reactivating. Take NASA's Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) spacecraft launched in 2000. Like CIRBE, IMAGE was designed to study the effect of solar storms on Earth's magnetosphere. For five years it provided superb data until one day in December 2005, it just stopped. With IMAGE presumed dead, its mission team moved onto other projects. Then many years later, in January 2018, something extraordinary happened: IMAGE came back. Its signal was picked up purely by chance by amateur radio astronomer named Scott Tilley, who at the time was searching for a lost U.S. military satellite. He contacted Richard Burley, IMAGE's mission director at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, who was astounded by the news. Burley and his team at NASA set about reestablishing contact to confirm that it was indeed IMAGE, and identified the signal code to be IMAGE's ID of 166. Regaining control of the spacecraft, they discovered something remarkable: electronics that had been damaged in 2004 by a cosmic ray strike — or what Burley says NASA call a "Single Event Upset," or SEU. IMAGE's power distribution unit, or PDU, had two sides, an A and a B side. "It was about IMAGE's only redundant part," Burley told The SEU knocked out the PDU's A-side, forcing technicians to swap to its B-side. Yet when contact was re-established in 2018, the PDU was back onto its fully operational A-side. This could only have happened if IMAGE had rebooted its systems. As it turned out, it had been doing that a lot. RELATED STORIES: — See a dead Chinese satellite burn up as a brilliant fireball in the night sky (video) — Dead NASA satellite crashes to Earth over the Sahara Desert — A dead NASA satellite from the 1980s just fell to Earth to meet its fiery demise After close investigation, Burley and the IMAGE team were able to work out what had happened. The cosmic ray strike had damaged the PDU to the point that it began to think that power was still going to its radio transponder, when in actuality it was not. This is what caused the initial blackout back in 2005. "Spacecraft have a 'command watchdog timeout,'" Burley said. "This is designed into the computer so that if it receives no commands in a pre-programmed amount of time it will reboot the spacecraft's computer." For IMAGE, this pre-programmed amount of time was 72 hours. However, the reboot doesn't reset the PDU, so each time IMAGE rebooted it thought that its transponder was still working when it wasn't. Because it was''t receiving any communications from Earth, where everybody thought IMAGE was dead, the spacecraft kept rebooting every 72 hours for 13 long years and not getting anywhere with it, like it was trapped in some kind of hellish purgatory, a spacecraft Groundhog Day. Somewhere along the line, the PDU reset itself, switched itself back to its A-side in the process, and power started to flow once more to the transponder so that it could finally call home. In a way it was like the victim of a stroke losing the ability to move half their body or to speak, only to regain that ability much later. Burley states that cosmic ray strikes on spacecraft are common events, and usually the on-board error detection and correction protocols can fix single bit errors, such as a 0 being flipped to a 1 or vice versa. "Multi-bit errors are more problematic,' said Burley, and that's what had happened to IMAGE. "It turns out that two other NASA Goddard spacecraft suffered similar anomalies in their SSPCs [solid state power controllers, which are part of their PDUs]," said Burley. Fortunately in the other two cases, the damage had not knocked out their transponders, so communication to diagnose and fix the resulting problems was still possible. All the affected SSPCs came from the same batch that was sufficiently radiation-hardened to protect against cosmic-ray strikes. As for IMAGE, all that time alone in space had done it no favors. On Feb. 24, 2018, NASA lost contact with IMAGE again, and when it was picked up its signal was weak. This lasted until May 2018, when it began broadcasting loudly once more, but was not accepting all the commands sent via mission control. There were also problems finding the hardware to run computer programs written at the turn of the century that could allow greater control of the spacecraft and analyze its telemetry. The last time that IMAGE was heard from was Aug. 28, 2018. The examples of CIRBE and IMAGE are of unplanned switch-offs, but increasingly frequently spacecraft are being deliberately placed into hibernation. This is done mainly to conserve power and function during a long voyage — for example, the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer will spend much of its eight-year voyage to Jupiter in hibernation, whereupon arrival it will be resurrected to study the giant planet's frozen moons of Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. The first ever spacecraft to be placed in hibernation was the European Space Agency's Giotto mission. After its historic rendezvous with comet Halley in 1986, Giotto was switched off to save it for a planned rendezvous with another comet, called Grigg–Skjellerup. Giotto was reawakened on July 2, 1990 to fly past Earth and gain a gravitational slingshot to send it to the double-barreled comet, which it encountered on July 10, 1992. Thirteen days later, Giotto was switched off again, and was finally allowed to rest. Sometimes, spacecraft are deliberately but unexpectedly raised from the dead. Take NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. Launched in 2009 to survey the entire sky in infrared light, it required coolant to keep its instruments cold and prevent thermal noise from the spacecraft drowning out the faint infrared photons that fell on its optics. When its coolant ran out in September 2010, NASA kept WISE going for a few months in a new guise — NEOWISE — to hunt for near-Earth objects (NEOs) that are visible at the warmer infrared wavelengths that didn't require coolant for the spacecraft to detect them. NEOWISE was shut down in February 2011. The Chelyabinsk airburst, caused when a small asteroid entered Earth's atmosphere and exploded over a Russian city in February 2013, rattled many astronomers, space agencies and governments, and partly in response to this dramatic event, NASA reactivated NEOWISE in September 2013. NEOWISE subsequently spent 11 years successfully hunting down asteroids and comets, including 2020's bright naked-eye comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE. NEOWISE finally ended its second tour of duty in August 2024 and was left to burn up in Earth's atmosphere on Nov. 1, 2024. Not all spacecraft awake from hibernation as successfully as NEOWISE or Giotto. All the way back in 1978 NASA launched the ISEE-3 spacecraft, subsequently renamed as the International Cometary Explorer. Its main claim to fame is being the first spacecraft to fly close to a comet, passing within 4,800 miles (7,800 km) of the nucleus of comet Giacobini–Zinner and passing through its plasma tail and taking readings in September 1985. It carried on through to 1997; NASA checked in on it again briefly in 1999 and 2008 before leaving it be. Then in 2014, an independent group of space enthusiasts were awarded permission by NASA to reactivate the spacecraft and, on May 29 that year they reestablished two-way communications with it. They managed to fire some of its thrusters, but soon enough those thruster firings began to fail as a result of falling nitrogen pressure in the on board fuel tanks. Final contact was on Sept. 16, 2014. It was a good idea — if it had worked it might have opened the door to resuscitating other retired satellites, but it just goes to show that being a spacecraft necromancer is not an easy thing. And as CIRBE and IMAGE proved, sometimes it is the spacecraft itself that casts its own spells.
Yahoo
12-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Earth grew an extra, never-before-seen 'radiation belt' after last year's supercharged solar storm — and it's probably still there
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Earth grew a pair of extra "radiation belts" after a supercharged solar storm rocked our planet's magnetic field last year, data from a resurrected NASA spacecraft reveal. And one of the invisible bands, which is unlike any similar structure seen before, might still be there. In May 2024, Earth was hit with its biggest geomagnetic storm in 21 years after a barrage of solar storms slammed into our planet, disrupting the magnetosphere and painting some of the most widespread aurora displays in the last 500 years. The geomagnetic disturbance also caused GPS-reliant machinery to malfunction. In a new study published Feb. 6 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, researchers analyzed new data collected by NASA's Colorado Inner Radiation Belt Experiment (CIRBE) satellite and discovered that two temporary radiation belts also emerged around our planet following the storms. The belts were created when charged particles from the solar outbursts became trapped by Earth's magnetic field. These bands are similar to the Van Allen belts — a pair of permanent donut-shaped radiation belts that extend up to 36,000 miles (58,000 kilometers) from Earth's surface and help to shield our planet from solar wind and cosmic rays. The two new bands settled in the space between the inner Van Allen belt and the outer Van Allen belt. Like the permanent structures, the outermost of the two temporary bands contained mostly electrons, whizzing around at near-light speed. However, the innermost temporary belt contained a surprising number of protons, which has never been seen in other temporary radiation belts before, researchers wrote. Related: 10 supercharged solar storms that blew us away in 2024 "When we compared the data from before and after the storm, I said, 'Wow, this is something really new,'" study lead author Xinlin Li, a space physicist and aerospace engineer at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in a NASA statement. The configuration of the proton belt was "really stunning," he added. The CIRBE satellite was offline during May's superstorm, after malfunctioning in mid-April last year. However, on June 15, 2024, the spacecraft suddenly sprang back to life and resumed taking measurements. The breadbox-sized spacecraft, known as a CubeSat, was equipped with a unique device that could detect specific particles within the Van Allen belts. If it had never come back online, the researchers would not have discovered the new proton belt, the team noted. It "wasn't visible in the data from other spacecraft," Li said. "We are very proud that our very small CubeSat made such a discovery." CIRBE continued to take measurements of the new belts until October 2024 when subsequent solar storms caused it to fall out of orbit and burn up in Earth's atmosphere, NASA representatives said in the statement. Temporary radiation belts are nothing new. After major solar storms, charged particles often get temporarily trapped between the Van Allen belts for a few weeks. However, the newest additions to Earth's radiation shield have survived much longer than most, likely due to the intensity of May's solar storm. The outer electron belt disappeared around three months after the storm, following further bombardment from a major solar storm in June and another in August, the researchers wrote. RELATED STORIES —X-class solar flares hit a new record in 2024 and could spike further this year — but the sun isn't entirely to blame, experts say —Sunspots surge to 23-year high as solar maximum continues to intensify far beyond initial expectations —We are fast approaching the sun's 'battle zone' — and it could be even worse than solar maximum, experts warn However, the inner proton belt has proved to be much more resilient and "is likely still there today," NASA representatives wrote. But it is hard to tell for sure without CIRBE. It is currently unclear why the inner belt has held on for so long. It could be because of its unique configuration or be tied to the increased number of solar storms during solar maximum — the most active phase of the sun's roughly 11-year solar cycle, which officially began earlier last year.
Yahoo
12-02-2025
- Science
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Huge solar storm in May 2024 spawned 2 new radiation belts around Earth
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The great solar storm of May 2024, which sparked beautiful auroral displays over much of the world, also created two new radiation belts that were observed with a satellite that came back from the dead. "This is really stunning," Xinlin Li, a professor at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said in a statement. "When we compared the data from before and after the storm, I said, 'Wow, this is something really new'." May 2024 saw a series of powerful storms erupt from our sun, spewing clouds of charged particles into space and culminating in a dramatic display of aurora borealis (northern lights) and aurora australis (southern lights) — the result of the most powerful geomagnetic storm experienced on Earth since March 1989. And NASA's Colorado Inner Radiation Belt Experiment (CIRBE) satellite had slept through the whole thing. Designed to study Earth's Van Allen radiation belts, CIRBE launched in April 2023 but fell silent in mid-April 2024 as the result of an onboard technical issue. It reawakened in June, and when it did come around, something had changed: Two brand-new radiation belts had appeared! The Van Allen radiation belts contain charged particles held in place by our Earth's magnetic field. There are two permanent belts, but the appearance of a new temporary radiation belt between the two permanent belts following a solar storm is not unusual — such short-lived belts were first detected in 2013. What CIRBE found to be unusual about these two new belts following the May 2024 event was their composition and lifetime. Usually, temporary belts that form following a solar storm are composed of high-energy electrons. One of the new belts found by CIRBE fit this pattern. However the other belt contained a substantial abundance of high-energy protons, too (protons are found also in the permanent radiation belts). Their presence in the new belt is believed to be the product of the intensity of May 2024's solar storms. Temporary radiation belts also usually last for at most four weeks before dissipating, but the new belts found by CIRBE had much longer lifespans: The electron-dominated belt survived for three months after the solar storm, while the proton-dominated belt is believed to still be wrapped around Earth even now. "These are really high-energy electrons and protons that have found their way into Earth's inner magnetic environment," said David Sibeck of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. "Some might stay in this place for a very long time." While solar storms can create new radiation belts like this, solar storms can also destroy them. A modestly powerful storm in June 2024 reduced the electron-dominated belt, and another storm in August 2024 almost wiped it out completely. The proton-rich belt remains because it is located in a more stable region where its protons are less vulnerable to being bumped out of orbit. The existence of these temporary belts containing high-energy charged particles — the energy range of the electrons was 1.3 to 5 megaelectronvolts (MeV), and for the protons it was even greater at 6.8 to 20 MeV — could have repercussions for launching spacecraft through the Van Allen belts to reach geostationary orbit (which lies at an altitude of 22,236 miles, or 35,785 kilometers) or beyond. The charged particles contained within the belts can damage electrical components in satellites and spacecraft, while providing an extra radiation hazard for astronauts should they ever head back to the moon or venture on to Mars. To ensure the greatest safety at launch, some future missions, particularly those carrying a crew, may need to modify their launch plans or carry extra shielding following solar storms. However, previous measurements have revealed discrepancies between solar age observations and theoretical models — and now, a team led by Bétrisey has shown that it's probably the sun's own magnetic activity that is at fault. This is surprising, because the consensus had previously been that magnetic activity should have no impact at all. Bétrisey's team looked at 26.5 years' worth of data from two sun-observing programs. One was BISON, the Birmingham Solar Oscillations Network, which is a collection of ground-based solar observatories overseen by scientists at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. The other was GOLF, the Global Oscillations at Low Frequency instrument on the joint NASA–ESA SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) mission that was launched in 1995. Our sun undergoes an 11-year cycle of magnetic activity, rising from solar minimum when there are hardly any sunspots visible, to solar maximum when there are sunspots, prominences, coronal mass ejections and flares aplenty. The BISON and GOLF data both showed a 6.5% difference when measuring the sun's age via helioseismology at solar minimum compared to at solar maximum. Furthermore, of the two solar cycles encompassed by the 26.5 years' worth of observations, both BISON and GOLF indicated that the cycle with stronger magnetic activity had a greater impact upon the discrepancy in the age measurement. Because, in the grand scheme of things, the sun is not a very active star, the results from BISON and GOLF suggest that "the impact of magnetic activity could be very significant for more active stars such as those that PLATO will detect," said Bétrisey. Related Stories: — May solar superstorm caused largest 'mass migration' of satellites in history — Solar storm frenzy of May 2024 was strong enough to affect the deep sea — Astrophotographer gets close-up look at monster sunspot that led to May's global auroras As for CIRBE, fate was nothing but ironic. While the effects of the May 2024 solar storm gave the cubesat one last shot at glory, it also spelled its doom. The storm injected a substantial amount of energy into Earth's upper atmosphere, inflating the thermosphere and increasing the atmospheric drag on the satellite. This slowed its orbit, causing it to drop down to increasingly lower altitudes. Eventually, it de-orbited and burned up in October. The discovery of the two new radiation belts was published on Feb. 6 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.
Yahoo
08-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Remember the northern lights that reached Florida? The solar storm created radiation belts around Earth
A discovery made by a Nasa CubeSat has revealed that the historic solar storm of 2024, which caused the aurora borealis to be visible as far south as Florida and the northern Caribbean, also produced temporary radiation belts around Earth. NASA's CIRBE satellite detected both electrons and protons in the belts, which lasted several months, with some particles potentially still in orbit nearly a year later. The space agency reported that these new belts formed between the Earth's permanent radiation layers, known as the Van Allen Belts. Named after scientist James Van Allen, who discovered them in the 1950s, the Van Allen Belts are composed of charged particles trapped by Earth's magnetic field. The inner belt lies between approximately 600 miles and 8,000 miles above Earth's surface, while the outer belt extends from about 8,000 miles to more than 30,000 miles above the planet. The two newly discovered belts are thought to have formed between these permanent belts, with at least one exhibiting a composition never seen before. "When we compared the data from before and after the storm, I said, 'Wow, this is something really new,'" Xinlin Li, an engineering sciences professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in a statement. "This is really stunning." Mesmerizing Time-lapse Videos Show Northern Lights Dazzling Skygazers Around The World NASA said the particles that make up the belts can damage spacecraft and satellites that pass through them on their way to their final orbit. Aside from space travel, the belts are not thought to have any direct impact on Earth's surface. However, they are known to help protect the planet from incoming radiation caused by events such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections. Space experts contend that understanding the dynamics of these temporary belts is crucial for ensuring the safety of future space missions. "Our current technology is ever more susceptible to these accelerated particles because even a single hit from a particle can upset our ever smaller instruments and electronics," David Sibeck, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, previously stated in regard to the permanent belts. "As technology advances, it's actually becoming even more pressing to understand and predict our space environment." The History Of Earth's Greatest Solar Storms Coincidentally, the same satellite that measured the effects of the solar storm also became a victim of it, as increased atmospheric drag caused it to lose its orbit in the months that followed. "We are very proud that our very small CubeSat made such a discovery," Li said. The Sun is believed to have reached solar maximum in October during what is known as the peak of Solar Cycle 25. The cycle began in 2019 and is expected to last until around 2030 but will generally have decreasing amounts of activity as the cycle article source: Remember the northern lights that reached Florida? The solar storm created radiation belts around Earth
