Modeling satellite orbital drag during extreme magnetic storms
Abstract
Magnetic storms can dramatically heat the Earth's upper atmosphere impacting the orbits of the many thousands of space objects within low-Earth orbit (LEO) as the drag forces they experience increase. Maintaining an accurate catalogue and tracking all space objects and debris within LEO is critical for the safety of human functions in space and on Earth. We use a set of nearly 40 extreme magnetic storms that occurred during the space era (since 1957) to study the effect of satellite orbital drag at LEO. The storms are defined as "extreme" when the minimum value of magnetic perturbations expressed by the Dst (or SYM-H) index are ≤ -250 nT. Thermosphere neutral densities are obtained from the CHAMP and GRACE observations. We use a newly developed technique for cross-calibrating all neutral density data sets with respect to a background quiet neutral density by employing the Jacchia-Bowman 2008 (JB2008) empirical model to isolate storm effects from the background. We use the cross-calibrated density data to compute drag effects at LEO. We use the 20 Nov 2003 extreme storm as the benchmark storm for this study. This means that we use this storm's pre-storm, during storm and post-storm background conditions and the basis of all 40 extreme storms. For each of the 40 extreme storms, we keep all background conditions the same as for the 20 Nov 2003 storm, and only replace the 20 Nov 2003 Dst for the actual Dst for each extreme storm. We rerun JB2008 to observe the behavior differences, with respect to the 20 Nov 2003 storm, that arise for each one of the 40 extreme storms. Finally, drag effects for additional extreme historic events, such as the Carrington event (2 Sep 1859), the 25 Sep 1909 event, and the 15 May 1921 event are compared to the drag effects during the 13-14 Mar 1989, the most extreme storm of space age.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMSM22B..07O
- Keywords:
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- 7924 Forecasting;
- SPACE WEATHER;
- 7934 Impacts on technological systems;
- SPACE WEATHER;
- 7959 Models;
- SPACE WEATHER;
- 7984 Space radiation environment;
- SPACE WEATHER