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6.13.24
Lulu Zhao | University of Michigan
The Sun can send out eruptions of energetic particles. NASA/SDO via AP
“NASA has set its sights on the Moon, aiming to send astronauts back to the lunar surface by 2026 and establish a long-term presence there by the 2030s. But the Moon isn’t exactly a habitable place for people.
Cosmic rays from distant stars and galaxies and solar energetic particles from the Sun bombard the surface, and exposure to these particles can pose a risk to human health.
Both galactic cosmic rays and solar energetic particles, are high-energy particles that travel close to the speed of light.
While galactic cosmic radiation trickles toward the Moon in a relatively steady stream, energetic particles can come from the Sun in big bursts. These particles can penetrate human flesh and increase the risk of cancer.
Earth has a magnetic field that provides a shield against high-energy particles from space.
But the Moon doesn’t have a magnetic field, leaving its surface vulnerable to bombardment by these particles.
During a large solar energetic particle event, the radiation dosage an astronaut receives inside a space suit could exceed 1,000 times the dosage someone on Earth receives. That would exceed an astronaut’s recommended lifetime limit by 10 times.
NASA’s Artemis program, which began in 2017, intends to reestablish a human presence on the Moon for the first time since 1972. My colleagues and I at the University of Michigan’s CLEAR center, the Center for All-Clear SEP Forecast, are working on predicting these particle ejections from the Sun. Forecasting these events may help protect future Artemis crew members.
An 11-year solar cycle
The Moon is facing dangerous levels of radiation in 2024, since the Sun is approaching the maximum point in its 11-year solar cycle. This cycle is driven by the Sun’s magnetic field, whose total strength changes dramatically every 11 years. When the Sun approaches its maximum activity, as many as 20 large solar energetic particle events can happen each year.
Both solar flares, which are sudden eruptions of electromagnetic radiation from the Sun, and coronal mass ejections, which are expulsions of a large amount of matter and magnetic fields from the Sun, can produce energetic particles.
August 31, 2012 Magnificent CME
The Sun is expected to reach its solar maximum in 2026, the target launch time for the Artemis III mission, which will land an astronaut crew on the Moon’s surface.
While researchers can follow the Sun’s cycle and predict trends, it’s difficult to guess when exactly each solar energetic particle event will occur, and how intense each event will be. Future astronauts on the Moon will need a warning system that predicts these events more precisely before they happen.
Forecasting solar events
In 2023, NASA funded a five-year space weather center of excellence called CLEAR, which aims to forecast the probability and intensity of solar energetic particle events.
Right now, forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Space Weather Prediction Center, the center that tracks solar events, can’t issue a warning for an incoming solar energetic particle event until they actually detect a solar flare or a coronal mass ejection. They detect these by looking at the Sun’s atmosphere and measuring X-rays that flow from the Sun.
Once a forecaster detects a solar flare or a coronal mass ejection, the high-energy particles usually arrive to Earth in less than an hour. But astronauts on the Moon’s surface would need more time than that to seek shelter. My team at CLEAR wants to predict solar flares and coronal mass ejections before they happen.
The solar magnetic field is incredibly complex and can change throughout the solar cycle. On the left, the magnetic field has two poles and looks relatively simple, though on the right, later in the solar cycle, the magnetic field has changed. When the solar magnetic field looks like the illustration on the right, solar flares and coronal mass ejections are more common. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Bridgman, CC BY
While scientists don’t totally understand what causes these solar events, they know that the Sun’s magnetic field is one of the key drivers. Specifically, they’re studying the strength and complexity of the magnetic field in certain regions on the Sun’s surface.
At the CLEAR center, we will monitor the Sun’s magnetic field using measurements from both ground-based and space-based telescopes and build machine learning models that predict solar events – hopefully more than 24 hours before they happen.
With the forecast framework developed at CLEAR, we also hope to predict when the particle flux falls back to a safe level. That way, we’ll be able to tell the astronauts when it’s safe to leave their shelter and continue their work on the lunar surface.”
See the full article here .
Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct.
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The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. Originally, founded in 1817 in Detroit as the “Catholepistemiad”, or “University of Michigania”, 20 years before the Michigan Territory officially became a state, the University of Michigan is the state’s oldest university. The university moved to Ann Arbor in 1837 onto 40 acres (16 ha) of what is now known as Central Campus. Since its establishment in Ann Arbor, the university campus has expanded to include more than 584 major buildings with a combined area of more than 34 million gross square feet (781 acres or 3.16 km²), and has two satellite campuses located in Flint and Dearborn. The University was one of the founding members of the Association of American Universities.
Considered one of the foremost research universities in the United States, the university has very high research activity and its comprehensive graduate program offers doctoral degrees in the humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) as well as professional degrees in business, medicine, law, pharmacy, nursing, social work and dentistry. Michigan’s body of living alumni comprises more than 500,000. Besides academic life, Michigan’s athletic teams compete in Division I of the NCAA and are collectively known as the Wolverines. They are members of the Big Ten Conference.
MacArthur “genius award” winners (alumni winners and faculty winners), Nobel Prize winners, Turing Award winners, Fields Medalists and Mitchell Scholars have been affiliated with the university. Its alumni include heads of state or government, including President of the United States Gerald Ford; cabinet-level officials; and living billionaires. It also has many alumni who are Fulbright Scholars and MacArthur Fellows.
Research
Michigan is one of the founding members (in the year 1900) of the Association of American Universities. With over 6,200 faculty members, many of whom are members of the National Academy and hold an endowed chair in their discipline, the university manages one of the largest annual collegiate research budgets of any university in the United States. U-M has a technology transfer office, which is the university conduit between laboratory research and corporate commercialization interests.
In 2009, the university signed an agreement to purchase a facility formerly owned by Pfizer. The acquisition includes over 170 acres (0.69 km^2) of property, and 30 major buildings comprising roughly 1,600,000 square feet (150,000 m^2) of wet laboratory space, and 400,000 square feet (37,000 m^2) of administrative space. At the time of the agreement, the university’s intentions for the space were not set, but the expectation was that the new space would allow the university to ramp up its research and ultimately employ in excess of 2,000 people.
The university is also a major contributor to the medical field with the EKG and the gastroscope. The university’s 13,000-acre (53 km^2) biological station in the Northern Lower Peninsula of Michigan is one of only 47 Biosphere Reserves in the United States.
In the mid-1960s U-M researchers worked with IBM to develop a new virtual memory architectural model that became part of IBM’s Model 360/67 mainframe computer (the 360/67 was initially dubbed the 360/65M where the “M” stood for Michigan). The Michigan Terminal System (MTS), an early time-sharing computer operating system developed at U-M, was the first system outside of IBM to use the 360/67’s virtual memory features.
U-M is home to the National Election Studies and the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index. The Correlates of War project, also located at U-M, is an accumulation of scientific knowledge about war. The university is also home to major research centers in optics, reconfigurable manufacturing systems, wireless integrated microsystems, and social sciences. The University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute and the Life Sciences Institute are located at the university. The Institute for Social Research (ISR), the nation’s longest-standing laboratory for interdisciplinary research in the social sciences, is home to the Survey Research Center, Research Center for Group Dynamics, Center for Political Studies, Population Studies Center, and Inter-Consortium for Political and Social Research. Undergraduate students are able to participate in various research projects through the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) as well as the UROP/Creative-Programs.
The U-M library system comprises nineteen individual libraries with twenty-four separate collections—roughly 13.3 million volumes. U-M was the original home of the JSTOR database, which contains about 750,000 digitized pages from the entire pre-1990 backfile of ten journals of history and economics, and has initiated a book digitization program in collaboration with Google. The University of Michigan Press is also a part of the U-M library system.
In the late 1960s U-M, together with Michigan State University and Wayne State University, founded the Merit Network, one of the first university computer networks. The Merit Network was then and remains today administratively hosted by U-M. Another major contribution took place in 1987 when a proposal submitted by the Merit Network together with its partners IBM, MCI, and the State of Michigan won a national competition to upgrade and expand the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) backbone from 56,000 to 1.5 million, and later to 45 million bits per second. In 2006, U-M joined with Michigan State University and Wayne State University to create the the University Research Corridor. This effort was undertaken to highlight the capabilities of the state’s three leading research institutions and drive the transformation of Michigan’s economy. The three universities are electronically interconnected via the Michigan LambdaRail (MiLR, pronounced ‘MY-lar’), a high-speed data network providing 10 Gbit/s connections between the three university campuses and other national and international network connection points in Chicago.
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