Original subtitles

T minus 10, nine, eight--

Seven, six, five, four--

A critical new warning system is taking

shape deep in outer space.

Zero, and lift off.

The Falcon takes flight propelling the deep space

climate observatory on a million mile journey to

protect our planet Earth.

On February 11, 2015, a Falcon Nine rocket

lifted off from Cape Canaveral carrying one

of the most important satellites ever to be sent in space.

The Deep Space Climate Observatory, or Discover.

Once reaching its orbit 100 days later,

nearly a million miles from Earth,

and 93 million miles from the Sun,

Discover became the newest weapon in a growing battle

to protect our planet against

a potentially devastating threat,

massive waves of highly charged solar particles

that periodically erupt from our very own Sun.

We don't understand the Sun.

And when we look at it we're trying to figure out

how does it work?

And a lot of that it is,

how does it work so we know how it affects us?

93.5 million miles away from Earth

most of us are completely oblivious to the extraordinary

activity taking place on our Sun's surface.

The Sun gives us warmth

and light as we go about our daily lives.

It fuels weather patterns that bring nurturing rains

and ultimately gives rise to virtually

all life on our planet.

But our sun also has a dark side.

It can produce powerful solar flares

and even more violent coronal mass ejections

that could potentially cripple most electronic devices,

communication networks,

even the veery power grid we depend on every day.

Well, worst case scenario would be something like another

Carrington Event, or perhaps even stronger occurring now

in today's highly technologically reliant society

you'd have much, much greater effects on all of our

infrastructure in a Carrington-like event.

The Carrington Event was one of the strongest

solar storms ever recorded.

On September 1, 1859 British astronomer Richard Carrington

was observing the Sun when he noticed a bright flash.

Less than a day later telegraph lines across America

and Europe began to spark and flare completely frying

large swaths of the network.

Outside, an eerie glow illuminated the night sky.

For the first time millions of people outside

the polar regions were treated to a brilliant display

they'd never witnessed before, the Aurora Borealis.

Magnetic storms and auroral storms had been seen for

centuries, of course, but there was no direct link between

those and the sun until the 1859 event

in which Richard Carrington saw a very large flare

go off on the sun.

This was the first, at least in western times,

recorded instance of an observation of a solar flare.

Within about 17 hours of him witnessing that flare,

there was a gigantic magnetic storm on Earth,

one of the largest we've ever recorded.

This caused aurora to go all the way down

to Central America and Cuba.

Typically the aurora are confined to the polar regions,

you're lucky if you see them in

the northern United States at times.

The aurora in this case in 1859 was very, very bright

all the way down to Venezuela and Cuba

and we have reports from Hawaii of the aurora in that storm.

A solar storm of that magnitude

could have a devastating impact on critical communications,

banking, and transportation networks.

It could also damage millions of custom built power

transformers that could take months to replace.

And if you have large amounts of this charged material

coming into the Earth's atmosphere it can actually disrupt

power grids, it can blow them out.

So, basically it can introduce surges of power into

our power grids and take down large power grids

across the world.

The most recent and most impactful storm is probably

in 1989 when there was a large scale blackout

of the Quebec power system caused by a coronal mass ejection

and that was a storm not quite as large in terms of

magnetic effects as the Carrington Event perhaps.

On March 13, 1989, it took over 75 seconds

for an electrical current from the aurora to penetrate

the ground and cause a catastrophic failure

of the Quebec power system.

For seven hours the three million residents of Montreal

were without power in the dead of winter,

shutting down almost all forms of transportation.

It it happened today a Carrington level solar event

could create unprecedented panic and chaos.

Scientists believe it could cost the US alone

more than three trillion dollars

and leave millions of people along the densely populated

eastern seaboard without power for up to a year.

Our ability to forecast what the Sun will do is surprisingly

limited considering it's our nearest star.

The Sun contains 99.9% of all mass in our solar system.

It's so big, in fact, that you could fit 1.3 million

Earths inside it.

Energy is produced in the center of the Sun,

takes about 30,000 years to get to the surface.

So, when we're looking at the surface of the Sun right now,

we're looking at energy that was produced 30,000 years ago.

Near the center of the Sun we know that

immense pressure is forcing hydrogen atoms to combine

to form helium in a process known as nuclear fusion.

The energy released is equivalent to billions of hydrogen

bombs going off in the core every second.

The sheer size and immense power of the Sun are hard

to grasp and make it extremely difficult to study.

We can see very, very shallowly into the Sun,

we can't see down to the center at all.

So, everything that we know about what goes on in the Sun

is either from the energy that comes out on the surface

of it and we mix that with theoretical calculations,

say, okay, we know what's going on at that upper layer

of the Sun that we can see,

let's use theory to calculate what's going on

right under that.

The Sun is monitored continually by telescopes

both on the ground and in orbit.

And the two things you really have to monitor about the sun

is the radio output, the photons, and the magnetic field.

So, the photons are monitored with a traditional telescope

looking at the light output of the sun,

but we also look at all the wavelengths that we can

coming out of the Sun.

So, there you need an orbiting telescope.

All the way out to radio wavelengths.

So, we have ground based radio telescopes looking at the sun

monitoring its radio output continually.

Scientific study of the Sun began in the 1600s

when Galileo discovered that he could observe the Sun's

surface by projecting an image of it onto paper.

He was surprised to learn that the Sun wasn't perfect.

Dark splotches littered its face.

And when he stacked his daily sketches together

into the world's first flip book movie,

he realized something else, those splotches,

and the entire Sun, were actually rotating.

Sunspots are relatively cool areas on the Sun's surface

caused by intense concentrations of magnetic activity.

They can grow to more than 20 times the size of Earth

and provide a warning for some of

the Sun's deadliest eruptions.

So, we have a lot of observatories around the world

looking at the sunspots on the surface of the sun.

And for well over 100 years there have been sunspot

counts, people have counted the number of sunspots on

the sun everyday to tell us how active it is.

The spots are the result of magnetic fields that get

twisted underneath the surface of the sun

and we can watch those spots come and go on more

or less an 11 year cycle.

So, the sun has an 11 year cycle of twisting up its field

lines, producing these spots then they go away,

and then they come back, and then they go away.

And again, this is on an 11 year cycle more or less.

Anytime you see a sunspot,

a sunspot will typically have another sunspot,

its twin, which is the opposite magnetic field polarity,

so they tend to come in pairs

or at least in magnetic polarity pairs

and they represent very, very intense magnetic fields,

thousands of times more intense

than the Earth's magnetic field.

And what they do is because of the intense magnetic fields

they suppress the normal convection or heat flow in the Sun

and therefore the light, the heat,

everything you see when you see the Sun,

is sort of blocked by a sunspot

and that's why they become a dark,

visible dark spot on the Sun.

In spite of all the work that's gone into

tracking and studying sunspots,

we still know remarkably little about why they occur

and the impact they could have on our planet.

There was a time in the 1600s where there were no sunspots

recorded on the Sun for decades.

It's called a Maunder Minimum

and if you look at artwork form that time period,

especially in Europe, you'll see that there are some

rivers that are frozen that haven't frozen since.

We don't know why the Sun lost its activity

for several decades.

We don't know why it stopped producing sunspots,

we don't know why it started producing sunspots again.

We don't know when it could happen again.

That could happen at any time.

What we do know is that wen the Sun changes its activity,

when it's no longer doing what we're used to it doing

every time it can affect us quite a bit.

Scientists aggressively monitor sunspots

because they're the key to forecasting

dangerous solar flares and the even more devastating

coronal mass ejections they can produce

that spew vast clouds of magnetic solar plasma

out into the universe.

A solar flare, is again,

tens of thousands of hydrogen bombs in terms of its energy

intensity, it's a huge, huge event compared to anything

we have on Earth and a coronal mass ejection has been

likened to having hundreds of thousands of tons

of material come out of the Sun at five million miles

an hour, so if you can imagine hundreds of thousands

of battle ships, for instance,

in terms of tonnage of weight coming out in a few seconds

in one gigantic eruption, that's what we're looking at

in terms of a coronal mass ejection.

Our only protection from these extraordinary

events and the daily bombardment of radioactive particles

from the Sun is the Earth's own magnetic field.

If the Earth didn't have a magnetic field

that would be very dangerous to humans.

Actually all types of life because that's radiation

and if we didn't have our magnetic field of the Earth

protecting us, that radiation would get into your DNA,

mess with it, mutate it potentially, destroy it,

and it would make it very hard for life to live.

So, we rely on our magnetic field to protect us

from this gentle breeze from the Sun.

Hardly a gentle breeze.

Out sun is sending us wave after wave of electromagnetic

and radioactive material that's a constant threat

to some of our most valuable assets on the planet.

This stuff is actually important to us

because it interacts with the Earth.

If you have enough of that material coming off the surface

of the Sun it could actually impair some

of the communications on the Earth,

you can ionize some of the upper regions of the atmosphere,

you can ionize, means that you can take some electrons off

of the atoms and that causes you to have a charged region

in the atmosphere and that disrupts radio communications

that rely on bouncing signals off the upper atmosphere.

Possibly the most vulnerable is our

global aviation infrastructure

where radio communication is critical.

Anytime an aircraft is flying they have a requirement

to report in on regular intervals using radio

to the ground station so that they know

that the aircraft is okay.

During a large solar event those radio communications

are completely unavailable.

So, a polar aircraft flight will not be able to communicate

with its ground stations during

a large solar flare, for instance.

Typically they're either rerouted

or they lower them in altitude

because not only do they lose communication due

to the solar flare effect on the ionosphere,

but there's a large outpouring of charge particles

or particle radiation.

With so much at stake,

scientists around the world are searching for ways

to provide more advanced warning

and gain a finer understanding of

the greatest potential threats.

The three big outputs form a solar eruption are

the electromagnetic radiation, the flare,

which arrives at the speed of light,

and then the coronal mass ejection going about

five million miles an hour coming out

as a magnetic cloud afterwards,

but ahead of that magnetic cloud you have a shockwave

that actually accelerates particles to near the speed

of light, so after the flare the next thing you see are

these electromagnetic particles coming down before

the arrival of a coronal mass ejection.

The initial and greatest threat from space

weather will not be directly to planet Earth,

but to the over 1,000 telecommunication satellites

that ar ein orbit and provide every imaginable convenience

from GPS to phone service

to military surveillance and research.

Geomagnetic storms can penetrate the outer shells

of satellites, disrupt communication,

destroy electrical systems,

and cause premature reentry as it did for Skylab in 1979.

In the US a small fleet of NOAA and NASA satellites

and telescopes continually monitor the sun

in a variety of wavelengths allowing officials

to issue warnings roughly 30 to 60 minutes

before the most energetic storms strike.

The scientists and engineers who prepared NASA's Discover

satellite for its five year mission hope it will

increase the amount of warning time up to a full 24 hours

or more and provide more precise data on where the worst

effects will be felt.

Recovery has acquisitioned a signal.

Standing by to pass through

the maximum aerodynamic pressure.

Vehicle is supersonic.

After launching in 2015 Discover traveled

more than a million miles to its new watch post in space.

A point of equal gravitational pull

between the Earth and the sun.

These are some of the first images that returned,

looking back at our planet with its epic polychromatic

imaging camera that's being used to study

Earth's atmosphere and climate.

Building on Discover's advanced suite of solar warning

instruments will be an even more ambitious mission.

Designed to gain a deeper understanding of the sun

than ever before.

This is the Parker Solar Probe, or Solar Probe Plus,

a one and a half billion dollar experiment

set to be launched in 2018.

It will travel up to 430 miles a second

and eventually dip into the Sun's atmosphere, the corona,

to get the closest look yet at where devastating

coronal mass ejections are born.

It will takes years for the Parker Solar Probe

to make its hazardous approach into the Sun's corona

in a series of enormous elliptical orbits.

But scientists hope that the data it gathers

will ultimately allow them to better understand

and forecast major solar events with far greater lead

time so that better preventative measures can be developed

to protect the sensitive electronics

and our vulnerable power grid.

Until then, the world will have to continue to rely

on the somewhat limited knowledge we've been able

to glean from more distant observations

of our violent sun.

This a bit surprising with our sun,

it's the closest star to us by far,

we have incredible amount of data on it,

we can measure its magnetic fields,

we can measure the material coming off of it,

we can measure the energy coming off of it extremely well,

we still don't know everything about it.

(dramatic music)