{"id":29173,"date":"2023-01-24T13:00:36","date_gmt":"2023-01-24T13:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/?p=29173"},"modified":"2023-01-24T13:00:36","modified_gmt":"2023-01-24T13:00:36","slug":"space-weather-causes-understood-with-3cm-glass-sphere-innovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/space-weather-causes-understood-with-3cm-glass-sphere-innovation\/29173\/","title":{"rendered":"Space weather causes understood with 3cm glass sphere innovation"},"content":{"rendered":"
In their new study, the researcher employed the glass sphere to recreate the type of gravity on or near stars and other planets. Recreating these conditions may help mitigate the effects of space weather, safeguard humans and equipment during space missions, and \u00a0ensure that satellites function.<\/p>\n
Space weather, such as solar flares<\/a>, can cause havoc with space missions, telecommunications, and other types of Earth-orbiting satellites. For example, 40 SpaceX satellites were knocked out by a solar storm last year<\/a>, and the phenomenon can also cause problems for military technology, as the formation of turbulent plasma around hypersonic missiles can interfere with weapons systems’ communications.<\/p>\n Researchers have been inhibited in their pursuit to overcome these challenges because the experiments they perform in laboratories on Earth are impacted by gravity in ways that are different to space conditions. The team’s glass sphere innovation can overcome these gravity issues in experiments intended to model convection that occurs in stars and other planets.<\/p>\n Seth Putterman, a UCLA physics professor and the study’s senior author, explained: “People were so interested in trying to model spherical convection with laboratory experiments that they actually put an experiment in the space shuttle because they couldn’t get a strong enough central force field on the ground.<\/p>\n “What we showed is that our system of microwave-generated sound produced gravity so strong that Earth’s gravity wasn’t a factor. We don’t need to go into space to do these experiments anymore.”<\/p>\n