Juha-Pekka Luntama, Head of the European Space Agency’s Space Weather Office, details the Office’s key activities helping to advance user knowledge of space weather and inform actions to protect infrastructure from its adverse impacts.
Space weather is the physical and phenomenological state of natural space environments, impacted by solar activity. It is primarily driven by behaviour near the Sun’s surface which can affect Earth’s space environment. In addition to the Sun, variations in non-solar sources of energetic particles, such as galactic cosmic rays, are also considered as space weather.
Severe space weather could have a detrimental impact on our society and infrastructure on Earth, with the potential to cause disruption to electrical power grids, transport, and satellite operations. It is therefore of vital importance to monitor and predict space weather events to inform mitigative actions.
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Space Weather Office works to provide owners and operators of critical spaceborne and ground-based infrastructure with timely and accurate information to enable mitigation of the adverse impacts of space weather. It recognises the importance of constant monitoring of the Sun and the space environment from a range of vantage points. Building on Europe’s well-established experience and assets for space weather observations and modelling, the Space Weather Office is developing a federated space-weather service-provision concept, avoiding duplication and ensuring that existing assets and resources play a key role in ESA’s space weather system. These services are being delivered through the Space Weather Service Network.
To find out more about the work of the Space Weather Office, Georgie Purcell spoke with Juha-Pekka Luntama, Head of the Space Weather Office at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre (ESOC).
What is the main objective of the Space Weather Office?
Its main objective is to develop the capability for Europe to help protect infrastructure and society from the impact of solar events and space weather. In addition, we can test and validate the results of these developments before they are transitioned into the operational framework for space weather services that Europe will hopefully be establishing in the near future.
Can you outline some of the key focuses and priorities of the Office at present?
There are three key areas of focus currently. It is important to start by discussing user engagement, because everything we do is driven by user needs. We are constantly in contact with the users – we present them with all the developments, products, services, and tools that are being produced in the framework of the space weather activities in the Space Safety Programme. We collect user feedback and take this into account in the further development and adjustment of those services to ensure they meet the needs of the users. A critical aspect of operational space weather is that the information provided to the users is actionable. It’s not enough that we just tell them that there is something interesting happening in space; the users must be able to make decisions based on the information that we provide.
The second area that we’re working on is the capabilities to provide this information. The most challenging part of space weather is forecasting solar events and their impacts on Earth. This is the area where we need more capability development. We can detect solar events when they happen, as long as we have sufficient space weather monitoring systems on ground and in space. But, in some cases, executing an efficient mitigation action to protect the sensitive infrastructure takes more time than we have after a solar event has been detected. This means that we would need to be able to give a reliable warning of an imminent solar event before it takes place. Such warnings require better understanding of solar physics than what we have today. We work very closely with our colleagues in the ESA Science Directorate who are working with missions like the Solar Orbiter, which produce better science and advances in science. We then utilise those advances to make the operational space weather capabilities better.
The third and final area is the observation systems. We are building the capability for Europe to improve our non-dependence in monitoring space weather and space weather impacts, so that we can facilitate those services to the end users.
Can you tell us more about the Space Weather Service Network and how it is progressing?
I think the Space Weather Service Network development will remain a work in progress, as there will always be room for improvement. The keyword here is ‘network’ – the service is networking the European space weather capabilities. We have already brought in more than 50 European space weather expert groups and institutes, research centres, and industry to collaborate to utilise the space weather monitoring data and produce the space weather products and services for the users.
We recently held a meeting where the participants of the network presented the achievements from the first period of the Space Safety programme. There have been huge steps forward in the capability that this network can provide to the end users. The next challenges will be in the area of user interfacing – making this information easy to access so that users can make decisions based on the information very quickly.
It is a ‘research to operations’ (R2O) platform, helping to transition the science and engineering prototypes of the service capability into something which is ready to be transitioned into the operational framework. We will continue developing this network further in the next period of the programme.
What are the main challenges when it comes to monitoring space weather and how are you addressing these?
The main challenge is that we still have very little observation data. It may look like we have a lot of satellites and missions, but, if we compare space weather to the network of monitoring the weather, we only have a fraction of the sampling points. Currently, we are trying to make a forecast based on very little information at the end. We are working to build further capability, both in space and on the ground. We have to keep in mind that a lot of space weather observations can be done from the ground, which is an area at the fringes of the space agency activity. We are doing this where we know that there are gaps in the European and ground-based observation capabilities.
One of the flagship space-based missions in our programme is Vigil. This is a completely new capability to observe the Sun from the side, from the Fifth Lagrange (L5) point. Other missions in progress currently include the Aurora mission to monitor the Aurora, and Sword, which is designed to measure Earth’s radiation belts. Very importantly, we also collaborate internationally with our colleagues particularly in the US, but also in Korea, Japan, South Africa, and Australia. We ensure that we co-ordinate the development of capabilities to avoid duplication. We focus on certain complementary missions and observations, and then we exchange data. This is a win-win-win situation – everybody wins when we have better coverage, more data, and can exchange the data and utilise it together.
What are your hopes for the future?
In terms of space weather forecasting, there are high hopes that utilising artificial intelligence (AI) will give us better space weather forecasts. Also, because time is critical for space weather forecasting, we can develop models that are faster to execute. Very recently, ESA inaugurated the ESA Space High Performance Computing (HPC) environment at ESRIN in Italy. Essentially, this is an ESA-owned supercomputer that we will utilise to improve our space weather forecasts. This is very closely linked to the long-term objective to ensure we can utilise data from all the upcoming space weather missions.
We want to conduct studies to develop the space weather models, and models that contain heliophysics, further. The goal is to have what we would call an ‘end-to-end space weather capability’ – when we detect something in the Sun, we would have a complete data processing chain to see what the impacts on Earth would be. For example, we would immediately be able to produce an estimate of how much this event will impact the power grids or another critical piece of infrastructure on Earth.
For the space weather monitoring, in addition to the European space weather missions, we hope to see South Korea build a mission that would put the spacecraft in the Fourth Lagrange (L4) point, which is opposite from the L5 point where the ESA Vigil mission will be. When we have further observation points around the Sun, we hope that we can make our forecasts of the solar events much better than what we can do today.
Is there anything else that you think needs to be addressed in order to allow space weather monitoring to accelerate?
As I mentioned at the beginning, Europe does not yet have an operational European space weather service. ESA is a development agency, and, whilst we have developed the capability and can test and validate it, we don’t yet have a location for this capability to operate 24/7. Establishing this would be critical for Europe, because we know from studies that a big space weather event can cost Europe hundreds of billions of euros. ESA is in dialogue with the European Commission on this topic and we foresee that the European Union and European Commission would become the governing body of such an operational space weather system in Europe.
Please note, this article will also appear in our Space Special Focus publication.