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Magnetische Stormen

Magnetische Stormen
VPRO Noorderlicht / 25 min / 23-05-1999
Het Noorderlicht heeft onvermoede duistere kanten. Het poollicht wordt veroorzaakt door geladen deeltjes afkosmtig van de zon, de zogeheten zonnewind. Maar als die toeneemt tot een zonnestorm lopen satellieten gevaar en kunnen elektriciteitsnetten uitvallen. Volgend jaar wordt het volgende zonnemaximum verwacht: het Andere Millenniumprobleem.

tekst van de uitzending:

VPRO NOORDERLICHT – TRANSCRIPT
AFLEVERING: MAGNETISCHE STORM
DOOR JOS WASSINK

START LEADER NOORDERLICHT

PAN NAAR TV IN HUISKAMER

GARY HECKMAN,
SENIOR FORECASTER SPACE ENVIRONMENT CENTER
It was a quiet day, about like this when things really began to happen. We had had some major flares for 2 to 3 days and we knew things were really heating up.

TV STOORT, KANAAL VALT WEG

But then the earth magnetic field, the instruments that measured all pegged, they went to the side of the recorder and locked there, because the disturbance was so great, it couldn’t measure the effects.

LICHT FLAKKERT, TV UIT, STAD BLACKOUT

That’s about the same time the electric power system started going down in Quebec, it’s the same time the strange radio transmissions started showing up when the police in San Francisco were trying to talk to their dispatcher and they were talking to Minneapolis, Minnesota instead.

RUIS OP TV

Garage door openers were opening automatically with no one being there in California because of stray radio signals and satellites were beginning to spin out of control. All about the same time of the day when that big bump in the storm hit.

AURORA-BEELDEN

SI TITEL (8 sec): MAGNETISCHE
STORMEN

EXT. VAN ALLEN HALL, UNIVERSITY OF IOWA

WOMAN:
Doctor Van Allen? He’s the person that this building is named after. He’s a physics professor.

TWO YOUNG FEMALE STUDENTS:
That’s just the name of the building, I don’t know if there’s a doctor.
– Yeah, there probably is, but he’s probably dead or something. I don’t know if he still lives here. Most of these halls are named after dead people…

MALE STUDENT:
One of the pioneers of the astrophysics

FEMALE STUDENT:
The first scientist who put an instrument on a satellite to go round the Earth and to measure I think it was gamma rays.

MIDDLE-AGED MAN:
Well there’s pictures of him all along here. One of the professors, he’s been here for years. He’s probably 83, 84 years old right now and he still comes to work every day.
You might catch him up there. Let’s see what’s him roomnumber if he’s there. Seventh. Seventh floor. If you go up on seventh floor, seven-o-one he might be there. But he comes in every day and still does a lot of research work and if there’s a flight going up in space or something, he’s right there taking notes with his pencil and everything.

LOOPJE KAMER VAN ALLEN IN

ROLTITEL:

‘En ik zag en zie, een stormwind kwam uit het noorden, een zware wolk met flikkerend vuur en omgeven door
een glans. Aldus was het voorkomen der verschijning
van de heerlijkheid des Heren.’ (Ezechiel 1:1)

PROF. JAMES A. VAN ALLEN,
PHYSICIST, UNIVERSITY OF IOWA
There have been recorded accounts for northern lights for at least 2000 years. (…) They were considered to be mysterious, basically mysterious, some kind of mysterious act of nature and no one really understood them and they were regarded as ominous indicators of some disasters portending some disastrous events like a plague or war or some disaster or other.
Around the beginning of this century, I would say the modern era of the explanation of the aurora occurred. And that came about in the dawn of the atomic age, where we understood about atoms and electrons and the idea began to develop that they were somehow due to streams of corpuscles of some kind.

ZONNEVLEKKEN

A number of people, very perceptive scientific people recognised that flares on the sun, these bright eruptions, these bright points on the sun were followed 2 to 3 days later in a fairly convincing way with the occurrence of these magnetic storms. Also, a large magnetic storm was typically associated with an extraordinarily bright aurora. So the connection was made secondarily that the flares on the sun somehow rather caused with a delay of 2 to 3 days the brilliance of the aurora.

ZONNEVLEKKEN

Of course the trouble was to find what it was that took 2 to 3 days to get from the sun to the Earth so it could influence the upper atmosphere of the Earth. And there were various ideas that they were some kind of so-called corpuscles like ions or electrons that were somehow blown off from the sun and flew through space and eventually reached the Earth.
It would correspond with what we now call the solar wind but was then called the solar corpuscular radiation.

PROF. VAN ALLEN PAKT FOTO:
Well this also shows some of the early work. These are releasing meteorological balloons. This is one of my stduents and myself. Here’s another picture of the icebreaker in the arctic icepack…

PROF. JAMES A. VAN ALLEN:
In 1952 the Iowa group started making high altitude measurements with balloon launched rockets in the arctic. And the principle purpose of these measurements was to survey cosmic ray intensity near the north magnetic pole. But in 1953 we had the good luck to make several rocket flights in the auroral zone and found that we were flying directly into an aurora, which was not visible because it was august, it was summer so we could not see it, but the evidence was very persuasive because the effect occurred within the well known auroral zone but not north of it and not south of it. So we had a very persuasive case that we actually penetrated the aurora. And the interpretation of our data of that expedition and with improved apparatus the following year showed that we were detecting electrons and that was the first direct measurement with rocket equipment of the primal auroral beam.

PROF. VAN ALLEN TOONT FOTO:
This is a rocket and here is the payload in this part here and you can see the nylon line that had suspended it from an open hook. The rocket was lifted to about 60.000 feet and that meant with a very simple and cheap one-stage rocket we could get to an altitude of 100 kilometers. Very inexpensive, a few hundred dollars for the rocket. An impressive achievement at that time.

INTRO EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY,
ESTEC NOORDWIJK

COMMENTAAR:
Ruim veertig jaar later zijn lanceringen routine geworden maar het Noorderlicht dat Van Allen onderzocht blijft voor verrassingen zorgen. Dat ondervond ook het European Space Agency met één van hun satellieten.

DR EAMONN DALY,
SPACE ENVIRONMENT SPECIALIST
EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY (ESA):
In 1982 the MAREX-A test communication satellite suddenly went into a safe mode and this coincided very closely with very strong aurora on the Earth. And when we investigated what had happened it was clear there had been a build up of electrostatic charge on the outside of the spacecraft which led to a discharge and the discharge had upset all the circuitry on the spacecraft and thrown it into this emergency mode.

INT. NOORDWIJK SPACE-EXPO

COMMENTAAR:
Niet altijd is de invloed van zonnewind op satellieten zo drastisch. Soms blijven ze wel functioneren, maar op een onverwachte manier.

DR EAMONN DALY:
MS Here we have an example of the previous generation of spacecraft that we used to build mainly in the 1980’s. This satellite is commonly known to people as Meteosat. It’s a weather forecasting tool that sits in the geostationary orbit.
The earlier generations of this satellite had some problems from space weather. In particular the telescope in which has a scanning mechanism was seen to stop and jump several times and when we analysed this in detail we found they were closely related to space weather events. We could see that they were related to very hot energetic plasma in the magnetosphere. This hot energetic plasma was caused by storms on the sun and we were able to generate very good correlations between the events and between the anomalies.

COMMENTAAR:
De straling, waaraan satellieten in de ruimte staan blootgesteld, veroorzaakt vaak onverwachte effecten. Dat gold ook voor de eerste Amerikaanse satelliet Explorer 1 die op 1 februari 1958 een instrument van Van Allen in een baan rond de aarde bracht.

LANCERING RAKET IN Z/W

PROF. JAMES A. VAN ALLEN:
That was the first successful American satellite which carried as it’s principle element of it’s payload an apparatus which we build here and this is .. it gives kind of an idea. This is NOT the Explorer 1 payload, but is one of the spare payloads of our balloon flied rocket missions. And so it has some resemblance in the following sense: this is a Geiger-Müller tube here, in this payload there were two different ones but in the Explorer 1 there was only one Geiger-Müller tube, which is a device for detecting radiation and then associated electronic equipment including batteries, transmitters and so forth.

Z/W: TRIO HEFT RAKET IN TRIOMF; APPLAUS

COMMENTAAR:
De vreugde, toen de eerste signalen van Explorer 1 binnenkwamen, maakte al snel plaats voor verbazing.

PROF. JAMES A. VAN ALLEN:
We saw that the counting rate went from it’s expected fairly low value and then went up very rapidly but then dropped back to zero. So again we were uneasy that there were some technical failure that we had not anticipated in the operation of the equipment. And we flew a similar apparatus with however the important addition of a magnetic tape recorder on Explorer III, which was a successful flight.
Well the very first pass we got showed this behaviour I described, except it showed to be repetitive and this repetitive pattern convinced me that we really had something real going on here which I didn’t yet understand.
Meanwhile, back at the lab Carl Mackowayne and Earnest Grey, who were students of mine at the time, had the idea that the zero counting rate was in fact due to an extremely high intensity. Not due to nothing, but to something very high. And they subjected a spare payload of Explorer I to the radiation of a small X-ray tube we had in the laboratory and demonstrated how much intensity would be required to drive it back to zero. And so the combination of the flight data and this laboratory experiment immediately illuminated the matter that we had a reliable piece of equipment but it was detecting an extraordinarily and totally unexpected intensity of very energetic particles and that was sort of the essence of our discovery. We worked on it for about three months before we made any public announcement to be sure whether we were right about this.

FOTO VAN ALLEN TIJDENS PERSCONFERENTIE

PROF. JAMES A. VAN ALLEN:
The concept I proposed at that time, which has remained valid ever since, was that for some unknown reason the Earth’s magnetic field is populated by very energetic charged particles, probably electrons and protons, they’re of unknown origin at that time but have an enormous intensity and very high energies.
They’re sort of like a, more or less like an equatorial torus round the Earth centred roughly around the magnetic equator of the Earth. Like a huge donut shaped regions encircling the Earth.
– And these were the Van Allen Belts?
Yes, yes, they became to have that name.

DR.EAMONN DALY, ESA:
The discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts was a very important one, indeed it was something that immediately people realised was going to limit the amount of activity you could do in space. This was a threat to the fledgling space program at that time and they realised that anything they’d put into space would have to be very carefully hardened against the effects of Van Allen’s radiation belts.

RADIATION FACILITY, ESA

We have to make sure that the components we fly in space will survive the radiation levels they will see in the radiation belts. In order to do that we put them in special test facilities, test cells, where we irradiate them for example with a Cobalt-60 source which gives a gamma ray beam. This simulates the space environment and simulates the exposure of this component to very high doses over the 10 year lifetime of a satellite. It tries to do this in a very short time. It’s only by doing this kind of testing that we’re sure that the components we put on spacecraft will survive.

DR EAMONN DAILY PUTS ON DUSTCOAT AND
ENTERS SATELITE ASSEMBLY HALL

OFF-SCREEN:
You can fully protect a satellite with shielding. The problem there is that every gram or every kilograms of extra matter you put on a spacecraft to shield it against this radiation means you can’t fly as much equipment as you wanted.
It’s a very careful balancing act between putting the right amount of shielding in and not compromising the performance of the equipment inside.

STANDING NEXT TO ARTEMIS SATELLITE,
TECHNICIANS ALL OVER THE PLACE

DR EAMONN DALY, ESA:
Here we have the main body of the Artemis satellite, it’s just now being readied for testing. And it’s open so you can see some of the features inside it, in particular there’s there a little black box on the inside. This is typical for boxes on spacecraft. These boxes contain lots of complicated electronics which are very radiation sensitive. So again we have to put additional shielding on these boxes to protect them against radiation which is coming from the sun and from the radiation belts.
Further up we see some other things that are sensitive to space weather. The materials on this satellite are specially coated so they’re conducting. We don’t like to fly non-conducting materials on the outside of spacecraft because they can charge up in the environment. They can reach very high electrical charge levels and we can have discharges on satellites.
So we have to take a lot of measures of any satellite we fly to protect it from the space weather.

INTRO BEELDEN SPACE ENVIRONMENT CENTER, BOULDER COLORADO

COMMENTAAR:
Bescherming van satellieten tegen straling en zonnewind is dus nooit volledig. Vandaar de groeiende interesse in het zogeheten ruimteweer.

DR. ERNEST HILDNER,
DIRECTOR SPACE ENVIRONMENT CENTER
The Space Environment Centre is to space weather what a national weather service is for meteorological weather. We monitor conditions in space that area of interest to systems operators and technology there and then we try to predict what the conditions will be.
The Space Environment Centre uses data, it uses models and it uses history in the forecaster’s brain to make the forecast or tomorrow.

FORECASTING ROOM SEC

GARY HECKMAN
SENIOR FORECASTER, SEC
This is an image from the sun made from a ground based telescope, and it tells us what’s going on right at the surface of the sun. The main thing that is of interest here are the active regions, the bright areas, the sunspots. There’s a sunspot available, or visible here where that dark spot is, and here a couple of sunspots. About the size of the Earth that spot is, that spot right there. The purpose of this picture is to make forecasts of solar flares. For today we have a probability for a small flare but nothing really large or too exciting. Overall it’s about a 30% chance, 25 – 30% chance of a moderate sized flare, 5% chance for a very large flare. It looks like it’s going to be quiet for the next four to five days and then things will be more interesting

BEELDEN ESA/NASA: KOLKENDE RODE ZON MET VLEKKEN

PROF. JAMES A. VAN ALLEN:
These great spots which appear on the surface of the Sun have been known since the time of Galileo, 1610 or there about. So the activity of the solar cycle, this approximate 11 year solar cycle has been known to be continuously going on since at least 1700 and it’ very well tracked.
The 11 year cycle also manifests itself in the varying activity of the northern lights. And during the maximum of solar activity, the lights are more intense, are commonly observed at lower latitudes, and the aurora become much more active.. during the periods of maximum solar activity during which time the solar wind is greatest and the most highly fluctuating.

ESA/NASA:
‘VLUCHT’ OVER KOLKEND ZONNE-OPPERVLAK

COMMENTAAR:
Het meest recente zonnemaximum vond plaats in 1989, zodat de volgende zonnestormen in het jaar 2000 verwacht worden.

DR ERNEST HILDNER,
DIRECTOR SEC:
Eleven years ago very few people used the global positioning system and we used, we did not have pager service or telephone service coming out of the sky using satellites. Now at this time, these systems, how well they work, can be affected by space weather and thus we rely much more on systems that are vulnerable to space weather.

VAN ALLEN LOOPT MET GROTE ORDNER DOOR Z’N KAMER

COMMENTAAR:
De langstlevende satelliet staat op naam van Van Allen. In 1972 vertrok de Pioneer X met zijn stralingsmeter aan boord. Nu staat de Pioneer X tachtig keer zover van de Zon als de Aarde en functioneert nog steeds.

PROF. JAMES A. VAN ALLEN:
In march 98 was the official termination of the measurement. So since then we’ve been running on informal arrangements. That’s what I call having important friends at low places. Officially it doesn’t exit anymore but among the working group it does.

COMMENTAAR:
Pioneer X vliegt steeds verder van de Zon, maar meet onveranderd de invloed van de zonnewind. Ergens moet die invloed ophouden. Van Allen hoopt nu te zien waar dat gebeurt.

PROF. JAMES A. VAN ALLEN
AAN DE HAND VAN EEN GRAFIEK:
This is the cosmic ray intensity of what we call galactic cosmic rays as a function of time during the whole history of the Pioneer X mission. Starting in 1972 and this carries through to 1998 and we still have a little more data in here. But this is counting rate showing the transient variations due to solar activities and here shows the 11-year cycle. It’s about 11 years from here to here, 11 years from here to here, 11 years from here to here.
We’ve just been having a minimum in 1997, 1998 and it’s just now picking up again. So we expect this curve this curve to go down and that’s one of the interesting test whether we’re still under the influence of the Sun or not.
– And if you’re out of the influence?
If we’re outside of the heliosphere, we expect this curve to climb and then level off and be flat from there on in the interstellar medium. That’s our big issue right now.

COMMENTAAR:
Op het Space Environment Center gaat de aandacht ondertussen uit naar de meer praktische aspecten van de zonnewind.

DR ERNEST HILDNER:
We expect the maximum of the solar cycle early in the year 00, it has been called the other Y2K problem by some people, but then for a period for 3 to 4 years we will have higher frequency and higher intensity solar storms and that will cause northern lights to be seen at much lower latitudes. One solar cycle ago, northern lights were reported from Cuba and Puerto Rico. If you get away from the city lights, there will be occasions were in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Munich, Paris even will be able to see Northern Lights.

DR EAMONN DALY:
What’s important is that in the next few year we’re going to see a massive increase in the use of space for civilian uses. At the moment we have about 400 active satellites in orbit, around 2 year ago we had 250. So we’ve seen a pretty strong increase in that time, but by 2004 we’ll have something like a 100 active satellites in space. And they’re all basically for the use by us on the Earth for communications, for navigation, really applications satellites.
– And they’re all vulnerable to space weather?
They’re becoming more vulnerable to space weather because they become more sophisticated, all these mobile phone satellites, navigation satellites, they have very complicated electronic systems on board and these are all vulnerable to space weather effects.
The solar cycles we’ve seen in the space age since Van Allen’s experiments had not been very severe. If you look back in history, the history of aurora in the past, you see there were very large geomagnetic storms earlier, in earlier cycles. And the worry is that one of these days we’ll be faced with one of these very large storms and this will cause us problems.

ESA/NASA:
LARGE EJECTIONS ON THE SUN

GARY HECKMAN,
FORECASTER SEC:
A year from now, chances are it will be much more interesting than it is today. We have reached the point of the 11 year cycle where activity should rise rapidly. That’s what we’re looking at some time in the next twelve months, we’re looking forward to that with some excitement here.

SAMENSTELLING & REGIE Jos Wassink

CAMERA Willem Heshusius
GELUID Menno Euwe
MONTAGE Jack van Doornik
MIXAGE Jack Bol
KLEURCORRECTIE Martin Klein
LEADER Marco Vermaas
COMMENTAAR Tessel Blok
REDACTIE Hansje van Etten
Hilbert Kamphuisen
Simon Rozendaal
Karin Schagen
Annemiek Smit
Marjan Tjaden
Jacqueline de Vree
Jos Wassink
Monique van de Water
Ger Wieberdink
ARCHIEF European Space Agency
NASA
University of Fairbanks, Alaska
Equinox, Channel Four
MMV Dr Alex Dessler
Larry Combs, SEC
Henrik Lundsted
Dr John Kappenman
Deanna Corridon, NASA
ESA:
B. Nickson
Ali Mohammadzadeh
Wil Spangenberg
Derek Nelson
Ab van Wijngaarden
PRODUCTIE Madeleine Somer
Karin Spiegel
EINDREDACTIE Rob van Hattum
Copyright 1999 VPRO

English version —>

Posted in Televisie, VPRO Noorderlicht.


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