When solar storms strike, the consequences can ripple through modern life in minutes. Satellites go silent, navigation systems falter and power networks risk collapse. A new British instrument presented this week offers a practical way to gain precious extra hours of notice.
Researchers from Imperial College London revealed the completed MAGIC device at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting in Birmingham. MAGIC, which stands for MAGnetometer from Imperial College, was developed with UK Space Agency funding through the European Space Agency's General Support Technology Programme. It measures the interplanetary magnetic field carried in the solar wind, data that can signal incoming trouble from the sun.
The instrument will travel aboard HENON, a technology demonstration CubeSat scheduled for launch in early 2027 as a secondary payload alongside the PLATO mission. Once in position, HENON will settle into a distant retrograde orbit about 0.1 astronomical units, or 15 million kilometres, upstream of Earth. That location sits ten times farther from our planet than the current monitoring point at the L1 Lagrange point.
Placing a magnetometer there allows scientists to sample the solar wind's magnetic field earlier. The result is a significant extension of warning times for severe space weather events such as coronal mass ejections. Current alerts from L1 typically provide around 15 minutes. HENON's vantage point could stretch that window to between two and three hours.
I am really excited to be working on the HENON mission because it paves the way for a dramatic improvement in our ability to respond to severe space weather.
Those are the words of Professor Jonathan Eastwood, professor of space physics at Imperial College London. He added that from a technology perspective the mission marks the first time the miniaturised MAGIC instrument will operate in deep space, directly measuring the interplanetary magnetic field.
The device itself weighs just 23 grams. It relies on anisotropic magnetoresistive sensors mounted on a one-metre deployable boom. MAGIC builds directly on earlier versions that flew on the CINEMA and RadCube missions. The flight model has now been finished and will soon head to Argotec in Italy for integration with the HENON spacecraft.
