Advanced Invention

A recurrence of the 1859 solar superstorm would be a cosmic Katrina, causing billions of dollars of damage to satellites, power grids and radio communications

• The solar superstorm of 1859 was the fiercest ever recorded. Auroras filled the sky as far south as the Caribbean, magnetic compasses went haywire and telegraph systems failed.
• Ice cores suggest that such a blast of solar particles happens only once every 500 years, but even the storms every 50 years could fry satellites, jam radios and cause coast-to-coast blackouts.
• The cost of such an event justifies more systematic solar monitoring and beefier protection for satellites and the power grid.

As night was falling across the Americas on Sunday, August 28, 1859, the phantom shapes of the auroras could already be seen overhead. From Maine to the tip of Florida, vivid curtains of light took the skies. Startled Cubans saw the auroras directly overhead; ships’ logs near the equator described crimson lights reaching halfway to the zenith. Many people thought their cities had caught fire. Scientific instruments around the world, patiently recording minute changes in Earth’s magnetism, suddenly shot off scale, and spurious electric currents surged into the world’s telegraph systems. In Baltimore telegraph operators labored from 8 p.m. until 10 a.m. the next day to transmit a mere 400-word press report.

Good news for Google Earth gazers: Those images are about to get a whole lot sharper. A new satellite named GeoEye-1 will be lifted into geosynchronous orbit on August 22, and will deliver peeps at double the sharpness of Google Earth’s typical 3-foot resolution. The bird, which is basically an ultra high-resolution digital camera with a huge telescope attached, will be able to deliver clear views of objects measuring just 20 inches across.

The satellite will be able to resolve even sharper images than that, down to 16 inches, but the government won’t let us see those pics for security reasons. We’re thinking it might be able to see even smaller objects, but they’re just not telling us. Even so, this resolution is fine enough to see the shapes of people, but maybe not sharp enough to read license plates. Hit continue to see an example of GeoEye-1’s .5-meter pics.

Better yet, this GeoEye-1 is such a fast picture taker that it can snap these high-rez shots of an area the size on Texas in one day. This means that soon, the entire Earth will be visible online in much higher resolution, available for free to the general public. While it won’t match some of Google Earth’s 6-inch resolution imagery seen in a scant few areas such as the Google campus, it’ll still be a noticeable improvement over what we have now. It’s yeat another example of space science benefiting us all.