From BBC
22 May 2024
By Jonathan Amos, @BBCAmos, Science correspondent
British engineers will lead the development of a new satellite to monitor the Sun for the energetic outbursts it sends towards Earth.
The announcement of Vigil, as the spacecraft will be known, is timely following the major solar storm that hit our planet earlier this month.
The event, the biggest in 20 years, produced bright auroral lights in skies across the world.
Airbus UK will assemble Vigil and make it ready for launch in 2031.
It’s a European Space Agency (Esa) mission. The €340m (£290m) industrial contract to initiate the build was signed at an Esa and European Union space council being held in Brussels.
Vigil will be sent to an observing position some 150 million km (93 million miles) from Earth so it can more easily view the gap between our planet and the Sun.
In this way it will get a unique perspective on:
solar flares – the intense flashes of radiation that travel at the speed of light and can degrade communications and navigation systemscoronal mass ejections (CMEs) – surges of charged particles, interlaced with magnetic fields, that can damage infrastructure, such as power grids
Today, nearly all the information about this “space weather” comes from satellites that look at the Sun head-on.
From its special vantage point, Vigil will be able to see potentially problematic regions on the rotating solar surface before they come into view of Earth.
“We’ll be giving ourselves three to four days additional warning,” said Dr Mark Gibbs, head of space weather forecasting at the
