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When planning to go on a trip, it is helpful to plan ahead. One of the first things to do is to check the weather forecast. The same goes for space travelers and with so many missions in preparation, NASA is now looking forward to see what weather forecasts look like for the next decade, and things seem to be going well.
Using the latest data on solar activity and a new predictive formula for predicting the peaks and troughs of solar weather, NASA says we are about to experience the quietest decade of the last two centuries, making it the perfect time to plan crewed missions to other worlds.
As NASA explains in a new blog post, our star's solar cycles last about 11 years, with periods of intense activity unfolding in a predictable manner. During periods of high activity, sunspots are more common and coronal mass ejections send charged particles into space.
This is the solar weather of this type that NASA would very much like to avoid, because that would amount to exposing astronauts to enormous amounts of radiation emitted by our star. Here on Earth, the planet's magnetic field acts as a shield, but astronauts traveling in space would not have the same protection.
Using decades of activity data and solar energy estimates, NASA researchers developed what they saw as a more accurate way of predicting the fluctuations of our star. The method has already been tested to predict the previous decade of space weather using existing data, and it has "worked well," according to NASA.
Knowing that the Sun may behave as NASA and other groups perform some of their most advanced missions without making exploration easier, but at least that does not make it any more difficult.
Source of the image: Justus de Cuveland / imageBROKER / Shutterstock
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