Storm of stardust threatens satellites

On 19 August 2003 Mark Henderson reported in The Times:

A cosmic dust storm is heading for the Earth, threatening to damage the solar panels of satellites and spacecraft.

The cloud of dust particles has already penetrated the Solar System, which is usually protected by the Sun’s magnetic field, the European space probe Ulysses has discovered.

Although the stardust is too small to have any direct effect on the Earth, being 100th of the width of a human hair, it is likely to rip chunks off the sides of asteroids. This will increase the amount of debris in the Solar System, creating a hazard for spacecraft and satellites. It is unlikely to knock out craft completely, but could damage solar panels, reducing their lifespan.

The dust storm, details of which are published in the Journal of Geophysical Research , could increase the number of meteors entering the Earth’s atmosphere.

A team led by Markus Landgraf, at the European Space Operation Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, has found that two to three times more stardust is pouring into the Solar System than at the end of the 1990s. The influx may be due to the system entering a region of dense cloud.

“Our Sun is about to join our closest stellar neighbour Alpha Centauri in its cloud,” the European Space Agency said. It takes more than 70,000 years to traverse a typical interstellar cloud.