Europa just conducted its most extreme space weather simulation yet—a scenario so severe that no spacecraft emerged from the exercise unscathed.
The European Space Agency (ESA) hosted the exercise at its mission control center in Darmstadt, Germany, to test how its satellites and operations teams would respond to a solar superstorm rivaling that of 1859. Carrington event — the most powerful geomagnetic storm ever recorded, capable of causing serious electronic disturbances. The simulation was designed to test spacecraft operations and space weather preparation ahead of the next Sentinel-1D mission, scheduled for launch in November.
In the simulation, the sun unleashed a triple threat. First came a huge X class. solar flarewhose radiation reached the Earth in eight minutes, disrupting communications, radars and tracking systems. A barrage of high-energy protons, electrons and alpha particles followed, impacting spacecraft in orbit, causing false readings, data corruption and possible hardware damage.
Then, about 15 hours later, a huge coronal mass ejection (CME) crashed into the Earth’s magnetic field. The top of the planet atmosphere It swelled, increasing the resistance to the satellites by up to 400%, knocking them out of their intended orbits, increasing the risk of collisions and shortening the longevity of the spacecraft.
On land, the same storm could overload power grids and pipelines with geomagnetic energy. The simulation forced ESA mission controllers to make decisions in real time, providing information on how to plan, approach and react when such an event occurs.
“The immense flow of energy ejected by the sun “It can cause damage to all our satellites in orbit,” Jorge Amaya, ESA’s Space Weather Modeling Coordinator, said in the statement. “Satellites in low Earth orbit are typically better protected by our atmosphere and magnetic field from space hazards, but an explosion of the magnitude of the Carrington event would leave no spacecraft safe.”
The exercise demonstrated how a severe solar storm could affect several systems, from satellite degraded navigation failures, up to the loss of critical communications. ESA scientists warned that such an event is inevitable.
“The key takeaway is that it’s not a matter of if but when,” Gustavo Baldo Carvalho, Sentinel-1D simulation director, said in the statement.
To prepare for the inevitable, ESA is expanding its monitoring network and preparing for the Vigil 2031 mission, a new spacecraft that will land on the sun.Land Point L5 to give earlier warnings of incoming solar flares. The goal, officials say, is to ensure that spacecraft and ground infrastructure can recover quickly.
