This redefined shooting star.
It’s not only spacecraft which are impacted by the horrors of deep space. In October, 15 people were hospitalized after a cosmic ray sent a Latest Jersey-bound JetBlue flight plunging hundreds of feet — a phenomenon that might potentially pose a threat to air travel.
“We’ve lots and a number of airplanes flying day-after-day, so very occasionally this stuff will occur,” Casey Dreier, Chief of Space Policy at The Planetary Society, told The Post. “If a particle strikes a critical circuit in a pc, it could possibly corrupt the pc’s memory, sensor data, or potentially cause other damage.”
This was allegedly the case with the aforementioned aircraft, which had been flying from Cancun, Mexico, to Newark when it was struck by a stream of high-energy particles from a distant supernova blast that traveled tens of millions of years, UK space experts claimed.
Pilots regained control and made an emergency landing in Tampa, Florida, but roughly 20 passengers sustained serious injuries, including bleeding head wounds.
“This caused what’s called a ‘bit flip,’ corrupting data within the flight computer and triggering sudden altitude loss,” Dreier explained. “The pilots recovered quickly, but yes, it might have been worse.”
Nevertheless, Dreier emphasized that it is a “hypothesis” and never an “official conclusion of what caused the incident.”
That being said, the space expert did warn that planes might be impacted by “cosmic rays,” that are “all over the place” and “consistently bombard Earth.”
Thankfully, threats from interstellar salvos are “not common for air travel due to the protections of Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere,” he said. “In space, it’s much worse, which is why most spacecraft use specialized hardware designed to guard sensitive components from such events.”
Thankfully, while these particle strikes occur consistently, the “odds of 1 hitting a critical circuit at just the mistaken moment are very low,” in line with Dreier.
Although he noted that the danger was higher when the sun is lively because of powerful particle bursts from solar flares.
Nevertheless, those interstellar particulate strikes aren’t the one threats from the cosmos. Dreier also warned about solar storms that may disrupt GPS, impact radio communications and even torpedo the facility grid.
In May, a colossal solar storm just zapped the daylight side of the planet, causing global blackouts and knocking out radio signals across Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Unfortunately, safeguarding ourselves against these deep-space radio disruptors isn’t any mean feat.
“There are each hardware and software improvements that may be made, particularly in error correction algorithms and possibly even deploying higher radiation shielding on sensitive electronics,” said Dreier. “That’s expensive, though, and the relative rarity of those events may limit the quantity of effort and money deployed to handle it.”
