Solar Storms

Space Race Heats Up: Starlink Milestone, Venus Flyby & Solar Storms Mark a Stellar Weekend

Key Facts Satellite Launch Highlights Starlink Launch Surge: SpaceX punctuated the end of August with a sunrise Falcon 9 launch on Aug. 31, carrying 28 Starlink V2 Mini satellites to low Earth orbit spaceflightnow.com. Liftoff occurred at 7:49 a.m. EDT from Cape Canaveral’s SLC-40, and about 8½ minutes later the veteran booster (B1077, now with 23 flights) nailed a landing on the Just Read the Instructions droneship spaceflightnow.com spaceflightnow.com. This mission – Starlink Group 10-14 – was SpaceX’s 9th Starlink launch of the month and 108th flight of 2025, extending the company’s record-breaking cadence spaceflightnow.com spaceflightnow.com. All told, over 1,900 Starlink satellites have been

1 September 2025

Space Race Frenzy: Starlink Soars, New Missions Ignite & Solar Storms Flicker (July 17-18, 2025)

NASA announced TRACERS, a pair of satellites to study Earth’s magnetosphere, slated to launch in late July 2025 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 from California, flying in tandem across the poles to observe magnetic reconnection, alongside three NASA tech demos including a “Polylingual” communications terminal and a smallsat radiation belt cleanup demonstrator. NASA announced SNIFS, the Solar Eruption Integral Field Spectrograph, to be carried by a sounding rocket from White Sands, New Mexico, with a July 18 launch window to study the Sun’s chromosphere and solar eruptions. NASA’s Crew-11 mission features four astronauts—Mike Fincke, Zena Cardman, Kimiya Yui, and Oleg

20 July 2025

Solar Storms · Space · Space Exploration · Space Missions · Space News · Starlink

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

20 June 2025

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