Solar Tempests & Orbital Guardians: The Secret Life of Space-Weather Satellites
1859: British astronomer Richard Carrington observed a powerful solar flare, and within a day telegraph systems worldwide went haywire while auroras appeared near the equator—the Carrington Event, the largest geomagnetic storm on record. During the 1957–58 International Geophysical Year, Explorer-1 became the first U.S. satellite to discover the Van Allen radiation belts encircling Earth. SOHO, launched in 1995, sits at the Sun–Earth L1 point and uses the LASCO coronagraph to image CMEs, providing continuous data for 1–3 day storm forecasts and imaging the Sun for over 25 years. ACE (launched 1997) and DSCOVR (launched 2015) operate upstream solar-wind monitors at