Just like our home atmosphere is subject to violent and dam- aging storms, such as Sandy, our space environment undergoes violent disruptions driven by powerful flares and coronal mass ejections from the Sun. These storms, which define the weather of our space environment, are much more energetic than the storms of terrestrial weather. Space storms are sometimes so explosive that they produce strong shock waves that completely deform the Earth’s magnetized atmosphere, the magnetosphere, and ultra-high energy particle radiation that can penetrate shield- ing to damage satellite electronics and, more important, the health of our astronauts. Furthermore, the effects of space weather are not confined to the space environment, but reach all the way down to the ground to produce the radiation that is dangerous to aircraft and current surges that can disrupt our electric power systems.
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