Spacecraft equipped with a solar sail could deliver earlier warnings of space weather threats to Earth’s technologies

The SWIFT constellation, shown not to scale in this illustration, will fly farther than its predecessors to improve space weather warning time. Steve Alvey

The burgeoning space industry and the technologies society increasingly relies on – electric grids, aviation and telecommunications – are all vulnerable to the same threat: space weather.

Space weather encompasses any variations in the space environment between the Sun and Earth. One common type of space weather event is called an interplanetary coronal mass ejection.