Satellites not strong enough to withstand sun's explosions, model shows.
A satellite such as the Hubble Space Telescope (pictured) could be disabled by a solar megastorm.
Earth-orbiting satellites are designed to withstand the sun's explosions—but they may not be strong enough to ride out a solar "megastorm," a new study says.
If hit by a powerful onslaught of solar energy and particles, Earth's atmosphere would be flooded with high-energy electrons accelerated to nearly the speed of light, according to a new computer model.
This would hinder operations of low-Earth orbiting, or LEO, satellites. The satellites wouldn't immediately start falling out of the sky following a megastorm, but they would malfunction much faster than previous models suggested.
"What we concluded based on our calculations is that a very strong storm would decrease the lifetime of a typical LEO satellite by a factor of ten," said study leader Yuri Shprits, a geophysicist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Though the results are still preliminary, Shprits predicts that a majority of the LEO satellite fleet could be lost within a few years of such an event.
What's more, the effect could last for up to a decade, the model showed.
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