A fleet of sentinel spacecraft, including one with a huge solar sail, could watch out for sneaky "space tornadoes" posing a threat to Earth during solar storms, a new study suggests.
The proposal says that four deep-space spacecraft, collectively called Space Weather Investigation Frontier (SWIFT), could speed up "space weather" warnings by 40%. While three spacecraft would be powered by conventional fuel, the fourth would have a solar sail roughly a third of the size of a football field.
