A US government task force established 11 years ago to handle space weather emergencies has demonstrated that it is incapable of successfully managing such a crisis, according to a recent report task force members released earlier this month. Several critical failures came to light at the conclusion of a two-day drill conducted in early May to assess US agencies' readiness in such a crisis. The drill staged a simulated crisis of several CMEs hurtling toward earth, creating widespread power and communications outages, radio blackouts and radiation hazards for NASA astronauts on a lunar mission.
This was the first exercise of its kind for the task force, which is known by the acronym SWORM, which stands for Space Weather Operations Research and Mitigation. Member agencies include the US Department of Homeland Security and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. According to the report, government agency protocols were shown to be weak and without effective interoffice coordination. Those challenges were called especially critical because warning for the impact of an incoming coronal mass ejection can be as long as a few days or as short as half an hour.
The report praised the exercise for identifying these issues and called for, among other things, development of an advanced warning system and sophisticated space-weather satellite systems. A link to the report is in the text version of this week's newscast at arnewsline.org