Guide Voice: These are pictures of coronal mass
ejections, known as CMEs, huge plasma clouds of hot gas that are
emitted from the sun. Pictures of these clouds can be quite
beautiful to look at but the clouds themselves can cause
devastating affects.
Travelling at speeds of up to 1,000 kilometres per second, when
these clouds collide with the earth they cause major disruption to
radio communications systems, and in extreme cases, can cause the
total loss of satellites. The impact of a CME can also induce huge
currents in trans-continental power lines, such as the one in
September 1989 which caused the whole of Quebec to lose its entire
power for a day.
SOT Prof.George Simnett -
"Back in 1996, one of these clouds actually caused the New
York Stock Market, the Dow Jones Index to drop by a few per cent
for just a moment... for an hour or so, because AT&T was about
to sell some of its satellites to another commercial operator. And
just as this deal was going through, a huge plasma cloud hit the
Earth and actually destroyed one of the spacecraft that they were
just about to sell and this deal all went haywire."
Guide Voice: Until recently
it has been almost impossible to predict the arrival of one of
these clouds. Chronographs used to detect the clouds have not
always been able to tell whether the ejection is coming towards the
earth or moving away.
The Birmingham University Astrophysics team
- a world leader in solar and heliospheric physics has developed
and built the Solar Mass Ejection Imager - SMEI, a purpose designed
instrument that provides early detection, monitoring and images of
these powerful masses of hot gas.The team successfully won a US Air
Force contract worth over $1 million, to build this specialist
equipment for Coriolis, a space mission to discover more about
these huge plasma clouds. With current US Military activities in
the Middle East, the obvious advantage of being able to predict a
cloud's potential impact with earth means that preparations can be
made for the temporary loss of such key communications between
military bases and those on the front line.
SOT: George Simnett -
"The military interest is probably topical at the moment
because of, of the Gulf War. Er clearly the Pentagon needs to
communicate with its troops in, in er in the Middle East and if
there was a huge plasma cloud about to hit the Earth or disrupt
radio communications just as they were about to mount some sort of
critical operation, they would probably postpone it for a day or
two."
Guide Voice: SMEI, operated
from a US air base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, contains three
cameras and a computer data handling system, that captures an image
of the entire sky every 1.5 hours, producing a global sky map. For
the first time, scientists will be able to see what these huge
plasma clouds look like and how they behave in their passage from
the sun to earth. SMEI will be able to provide a warning of up to 3
days of the arrival of a CME aimed toward Earth.
SOT: Dr Chris Eyles -
"Advances in modern technology have been crucial to
developing new generations of space instruments like SMEI. Te
optical sensor in SMEI is what we call a CCD, a Charged Couple
Device. It's similar to the sensor in a digital camera and these
sensors have developed very greatly over the last decade or so.
SMEI depends on a lot of on board computing or number crunching
within the spacecraft so again developments of micro processors and
computing systems have been crucial to producing new generations of
instruments like SMEI".
SOT: George Simnett -
"The Space Research Group at the University of Birmingham
is actually a world leader. We go back a long way in our history.
We've been building space instruments there for forty years would
you believe, and we've been doing high quality solar physics
research from space for over twenty five years. But the other thing
that makes this unique is that in addition to looking at the sun,
we also have got instruments on deep space probes such as Ulysses
and this gives us an entrée into studying the, the wider
heavens(?) and the sun of course is the dominant influence on this
big volume of space surrounding the sun in which all the planets
move".
END
