Space Weather and Satellite Navigation Systems

Space Weather is the weather of our space environment - solar-driven storms of radiation and magnetic fields that bombard our planet. This natural laboratory around the Earth allows us to explore dynamic physical processes of space weather and its effects are a threat to the operation of multiple electronic and electrical systems such as satellties and even our power grid.

Since the days of Sputnik, artificial satellites and spacecraft have always carried radio transmitters and these radio signals provide a ‘free’ radio resource to sense our environment. Professor Cathryn Mitchell was attracted to take up a career in space weather research because she was interested in the new field of radio tomography – the combination of multiple radio observations received from satellites to create ‘pictures’ or images of the space environment around Earth – the ionosphere.  These ionosphere images reveal the mysterious usually hidden world all around us in the…