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American Morning

Down to Earth

Aired October 30, 2003 - 09:42   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: The weather in space, simply miserable. And all you Chicken Littles out there, well, you're thinking maybe you were right. Neil Degrasse Tyson is director of the Hayden Planetarium, really, the best planetarium in the world, for my money, at the American Museum of Natural History here in New York. And that is an unpaid for plug.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON, DIR., HAYDEN PLANETARIUM: Yes, I had nothing to do with that plug.

O'BRIEN: Neil, good to see you again.

All right, let's talk about solar flares, what they are. You're good at putting it in layman's terms. We'll roll an animation and try to talk people through this.

TYSON: Well, as you know, the sun is a big ball of gas, but it doesn't all rotate as one piece. The equator rotates faster than the other latitudes. And as this magnetic field embedded within the material that gets wrapped around the ball, to the point where occasionally it snaps, and you get this snap of the magnetic field, as it punches through the surface and it flings like a sling shot, blobs of plasma, charge particles from the sun. And they head in any direction, but occasionally, they head towards earth, and they'll bathe the earth/moon system in these particles.

O'BRIEN: So it's a killer blob?

TYSON: Yes, it's the blob, but with a high tech version of this.

O'BRIEN: And we're not making this stuff up?

TYSON: No, no, it's real.

O'BRIEN: So when you have a place bombarded by x-rays, electromagnetic stuff, you think that would be bad for those of us here on the ground. But we've got some protection, don't we?

TYSON: Well, first, we are protected from the x-rays primarily, because of the ozone layer -- not the ozone -- yes, the ozone layer, which protects us from high-energy radiation from the sun.

But what we're generally really worried about is the level of electronics that we have in orbit around the Earth, very sensitive things to the high flux of protons and electrons.

O'BRIEN: All right. A little animation here to show what happens.

TYSON: Yes, A satellite minding its own business, and then here comes the blob, and if the satellite has sensitive silicon chips that where certain instructions tell it what to do, you can blast those instructions with a flux of protons that will give it the wrong instruction that can short circuit it and basically knock it dead.

Modern satellites can go into safe mode. So it's actually a weather forecast once you see the blob coming. Turn them all into safe mode, and then you do better.

O'BRIEN: Which may explain why we haven't had any real problems so far. Meanwhile, the International Space Station, there are a couple guys who are having to take cover, quite literally, because they're not protected.

TYSON: Yes, you don't want to go -- no spacewalks when this happens. And that's why it's technically the right thing to think of this as space weather. And we have satellites, NOAA satellites as well as NASA satellites in symphony to predict and alert us for when these happen.

O'BRIEN: Are we at a point now where enough is known about this that the satellite fleet as we know it is kind of hardened, and thus we're not seeing some of the major breakdowns we saw many years ago?

TYSON: That's an excellent point. We know -- now that we can predict it, we know what the effects are, we know what the heavy-duty ones do to the electronics, and so the latest generation of them have been hardened, and so we won't expect this -- what you do when this happens is you go north and look for the aurora, the Northern Lights.

O'BRIEN: This is the upside, to the blob.

TYSON: And for the big ones, it reaches farther south. It's not just the Alaskans and Canadians. In fact, the one from a couple of days ago, Colorado saw the Northern Lights, as well as parts of Texas. So it reaches further south when it's more powerful.

O'BRIEN: What do they call it the Southern Cross, too, down in the southern latitudes?

TYSON: That would be the Aurora Australis.

O'BRIEN: All right, I got it all mixed up, as usual.

All right, thank you very much. And don't forget the sunblock, right?

TYSON: yes, sun block a million.

O'BRIEN: All right, Neil Degrasse Tyson, with the Hayden Planetarium, thanks for being with us.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com






Aired October 30, 2003 - 09:42   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: The weather in space, simply miserable. And all you Chicken Littles out there, well, you're thinking maybe you were right. Neil Degrasse Tyson is director of the Hayden Planetarium, really, the best planetarium in the world, for my money, at the American Museum of Natural History here in New York. And that is an unpaid for plug.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON, DIR., HAYDEN PLANETARIUM: Yes, I had nothing to do with that plug.

O'BRIEN: Neil, good to see you again.

All right, let's talk about solar flares, what they are. You're good at putting it in layman's terms. We'll roll an animation and try to talk people through this.

TYSON: Well, as you know, the sun is a big ball of gas, but it doesn't all rotate as one piece. The equator rotates faster than the other latitudes. And as this magnetic field embedded within the material that gets wrapped around the ball, to the point where occasionally it snaps, and you get this snap of the magnetic field, as it punches through the surface and it flings like a sling shot, blobs of plasma, charge particles from the sun. And they head in any direction, but occasionally, they head towards earth, and they'll bathe the earth/moon system in these particles.

O'BRIEN: So it's a killer blob?

TYSON: Yes, it's the blob, but with a high tech version of this.

O'BRIEN: And we're not making this stuff up?

TYSON: No, no, it's real.

O'BRIEN: So when you have a place bombarded by x-rays, electromagnetic stuff, you think that would be bad for those of us here on the ground. But we've got some protection, don't we?

TYSON: Well, first, we are protected from the x-rays primarily, because of the ozone layer -- not the ozone -- yes, the ozone layer, which protects us from high-energy radiation from the sun.

But what we're generally really worried about is the level of electronics that we have in orbit around the Earth, very sensitive things to the high flux of protons and electrons.

O'BRIEN: All right. A little animation here to show what happens.

TYSON: Yes, A satellite minding its own business, and then here comes the blob, and if the satellite has sensitive silicon chips that where certain instructions tell it what to do, you can blast those instructions with a flux of protons that will give it the wrong instruction that can short circuit it and basically knock it dead.

Modern satellites can go into safe mode. So it's actually a weather forecast once you see the blob coming. Turn them all into safe mode, and then you do better.

O'BRIEN: Which may explain why we haven't had any real problems so far. Meanwhile, the International Space Station, there are a couple guys who are having to take cover, quite literally, because they're not protected.

TYSON: Yes, you don't want to go -- no spacewalks when this happens. And that's why it's technically the right thing to think of this as space weather. And we have satellites, NOAA satellites as well as NASA satellites in symphony to predict and alert us for when these happen.

O'BRIEN: Are we at a point now where enough is known about this that the satellite fleet as we know it is kind of hardened, and thus we're not seeing some of the major breakdowns we saw many years ago?

TYSON: That's an excellent point. We know -- now that we can predict it, we know what the effects are, we know what the heavy-duty ones do to the electronics, and so the latest generation of them have been hardened, and so we won't expect this -- what you do when this happens is you go north and look for the aurora, the Northern Lights.

O'BRIEN: This is the upside, to the blob.

TYSON: And for the big ones, it reaches farther south. It's not just the Alaskans and Canadians. In fact, the one from a couple of days ago, Colorado saw the Northern Lights, as well as parts of Texas. So it reaches further south when it's more powerful.

O'BRIEN: What do they call it the Southern Cross, too, down in the southern latitudes?

TYSON: That would be the Aurora Australis.

O'BRIEN: All right, I got it all mixed up, as usual.

All right, thank you very much. And don't forget the sunblock, right?

TYSON: yes, sun block a million.

O'BRIEN: All right, Neil Degrasse Tyson, with the Hayden Planetarium, thanks for being with us.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com