Posts Tagged ‘signal’

Solar storms are extremely powerful natural disasters, and they are able to cause a tremendous amount of economic damage. During a typical solar storm, the sun’s surface flares up and massive fireballs are shot into the Earth’s atmosphere. This often results in the harming of many of the electrical waves back down on earth; radio signals, satellite signals, and even cell phone signals can be shorted out from these powerful eruptions on the suns exterior. Of course, this means that a lot of GPS based equipment could very well loose accuracy or even complete satellite connection during one of these storms.

Due to the sun’s relative dormancy, solar storms tend to occur once every 11 years. The last recorded solar storm was in 2001, which means that the next one is expected to occur sometime in the year 2012.

While no solar storm is good, some can definitely be more devastating than others. Take, for example, the Great Solar Storm of 1859, when a massive solar storm burned telegraph wires all across Europe and the US. The incident was referred to as the 1859 Carrington Flare, and it caused every telegraph signal in two different countries to be completely blacked out. In today’s technology-reliant society, one can’t help but wonder what would happen if such a blackout occurred today. It could take months, if not years, to truly recover.

One of the reasons why these solar storms are so powerful is because of the enormous amount of electro-magnetic waves released by the sun, the same type of waves used in nuclear bombs and EMP devices. These electro-magnetic waves short out any electrical device within the area, and they can throw off any satellite or radio signals in that vicinity.

For better or for worse, our society uses this kind of technology in places like banks, communications, hospitals, computers, transportation systems, as well as in an enormous electrical grid that serves billions of people around the world. If this type of solar eruption were to occur, all memory storage on hard drives and databases could be completely whipped clean.

It’s unthinkable to imagine that a storm could completely shake the foundation of our society, especially when considering how completely dependent we are on technology. As the next solar storm approaches, it’s important to remember that any repeat of the Great Solar Storm of 1859 could bring our modernized society to a screeching halt.

Last week, the military went through a massive signal blackout, rendering all their GPS based equipment useless. The signal was only lost for about 10 minutes, but this begs the question: how vulnerable were we for those 10 minutes?

The military is in possession of over 10,000 GPS receivers, which they use on almost all of their equipment. “Anything that moves uses a GPS to track it” says our unknown source within the military. “GPS is so central to war that we just can’t leave home without it”.

According to the Air Force, this signal blackout was due to defective software in conjunction with capability problems. They also stated that none of their weapon systems were harmed from the blackout.

The military uses GPS systems on bombs, armored vehicles, ships, aircraft, and many more defense systems vital to the survival of out soldiers, and during this blackout, we were left near defenseless. What if our enemies gained the technology to duplicate this, causing all our GPS based equipment to be rendered useless. We would be unable to relay positions to one another, unable to know where our vessels were at all times, and we would not be able to drop precision guided missiles.

There have even been attempts in the past in doing so. In 2003, Iraq attempted to use a massive radar jamming machine in the hopes of cutting off the United States’ ability to drop air strikes on them. Luckily, US soldiers were able to get to the weapon and destroy it before it was ever activated. “Our GPS systems have never been breached before, and we are confident that it will never be breached in the future as well” said a spokes person for the military. “We are extremely confident in the safety and security of our GPS systems from all enemy attacks”.

With the growing conflicts in the Middle East, especially with Iran attempting to arm itself with nuclear power, we should all cross out fingered that malfunctions like this never happen again.