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Writer's pictureDavid Mitlyng

Weekly Takeaways-Halloween 2024

A Modern Horror Story - Part IV

Every Halloween we present a familiar horror story:You wake up. Emergency and rescue radios are down.Your location app is offline and planes are grounded worldwide.You attempt to go shopping, but the credit card isn't working. The ATM is down, too.As the day progresses both cell and internet service are lost, stores and restaurants are closed, and you can't even get gas. By the next morning the power is out.The cause? GPS is down. Think it can't happen? Consider the events of January 26, 2016. In the early morning hours, emergency radios went offline in the US and Canada, and communications and digital broadcasts around the world started to fail. Even power grids started to malfunction as network engineers scrambled frantically to prevent a global communication meltdown. The culprit: a 13 microsecond error in the timing from GPS. But, like most horror movies, there was a happy ending. Engineers found the cause was a simple ground software glitch when a GPS satellite was decommissioned and were able to fix the problem. Which raises the question - is there a sequel on the way? After all, the dangers are still out there, whether it is operator error, malicious actors, or solar storms (see below), so the goal is to learn from these close calls. There will always be scares, but we can reduce the anxiety. Happy Halloween!



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The Halloween Solar Storm of 2003

Horror movies usually have a sequel, but in real life you want to avoid them. Consider the tale of the Halloween Solar Storm of 2003. Between mid-October to early November 2003, around the time of the last solar max, there were a series of solar storms. These storms culminated in "an enormous solar flare - one of the largest ever recorded," followed by a series of powerful coronal mass ejections and geomagnetic storms. The storms ended up impacting affected "59% of the Earth and Space science missions," disrupted GPS, satellite, TV, and radio services, "sent several deep-space missions into safe mode or complete shutdown," and destroyed the Martian Radiation Environment Experiment aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter and the $640 million ADEOS-II spacecraft. But there was a bright side, as this catastrophe led to new planning to ensure these problems would be minimized in the future. Thanks to these preventive measures, we made it through a recent solar storm of similar magnitude "without any major serious consequences."

 

 

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