As Earth’s orbital traffic reaches an all-time high, a West Virginia University researcher is working to sharpen space weather forecasting and protect satellites and the services that depend on them from devastating solar disruptions.
Piyush Mehta , associate professor of mechanical, materials, and aerospace engineering at the WVU Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources , will improve the quantification and tracking of uncertainty in space weather forecasts. His work will enable satellite operators to make more informed decisions when preparing for a geomagnetic storm — a disturbance of Earth’s magnetic field and upper atmosphere, triggered by eruptions or fast-moving streams of charged particles, known as solar wind. These storms can disrupt radio signals, GPS navigation, and satellites.
“If the weatherman told you there’s going to be rain tomorrow, the next question you’re going to ask is, ‘What is the chance? Is it 100% or is it 10%?’ You will plan your day very differently if it was 100 versus if it was 10,” Mehta said.
With the support of a four-year, $2.7 million collaborative grant from the National Science Foundation, including $1.4 million to WVU, Mehta will lead a multi-institution team developing models for satellite operators managing risks from space weather. The team will combine machine learning and physics models to predict whether a solar storm will strike, when it will arrive, and how severe the resulting geomagnetic storm will be.
He’ll also examine the effects of solar storms on atmospheric drag. During a geomagnetic storm, the upper atmosphere heats and expands, thickening the air that satellites fly through, slowing them and pushing them off course. In that situation, operators can temporarily lose track of satellites, raising the risk of collisions.
Avoiding a collision in orbit is very different from swerving around an obstacle in a car, Mehta pointed out. Many satellites use low-thrust propulsion designed to conserve fuel, so orbit changes happen slowly and can require hours or days of lead time. And for most operators, it’s still a largely manual process.
“Imagine that burden on the operator for somebody who’s monitoring and operating five satellites versus somebody who’s operating 5,000 satellites,” Mehta said.
He cited two incidents that illustrate the stakes: In 1989, a major geomagnetic storm caused the U.S. military to temporarily lose track of more than 1,000 objects it was monitoring in orbit. In 2022, roughly 40 newly launched SpaceX satellites failed to raise their orbits after a space weather event and burned up reentering the atmosphere.
Mehta views uncertainty as a thread through the entire system — from solar activity to atmospheric drag, satellite orbits, and collision risk, and down to the governments, businesses, and consumers who rely on satellite services.
Those services can be disrupted through degraded performance, temporary outages, satellites pulled offline to dodge collisions or, in the extreme case, satellites lost entirely.
To avoid collisions, operators may have to divert a satellite, temporarily suspending its operations. Often, the collision warning that prompted it turns out to be unfounded.
“Most of those warnings turn out to be false alarms, because the uncertainties aren’t characterized correctly,” Mehta said.
As dependence on satellites for communication, weather forecasting, national security, and other critical fields grows, orbital clutter is getting worse. In 2017, fewer than 2,000 total satellites were spinning around Earth, Mehta said. Today, Starlink has more than 11,000 satellites in orbit, and tech companies, including SpaceX and Google, are pursuing plans to launch data centers into space.
“If you’re going to put data centers in orbit, you’re talking about millions of satellites,” Mehta said.
While this project focuses on satellites, space weather’s reach extends further. According to Mehta, scrambled radio signals can hamper communication during natural disasters and other emergencies, and geomagnetic storms have a history of disrupting power grids. The same 1989 storm that frustrated the U.S. military also took down a power grid in Quebec, sparking a nine-hour power outage for millions of people in the dead of winter.
WVU will lead two of the project’s four research thrusts: forecasting the storms, in collaboration with Southwest Research Institute scientist Subhamoy Chatterjee, who will co-advise a WVU doctoral student, and modeling how the storms heat and expand the upper atmosphere, increasing drag on satellites. Ohio State University will model how that drag alters satellite orbits and collision risk, and George Mason University will estimate the socioeconomic impact. Project partner LeoLabs, a commercial satellite-tracking company, will supply radar tracking data to validate the team’s models, and the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and NASA will provide operational input. The teams will work in parallel throughout the four-year project.
The grant pays for educational work alongside the research. Mehta’s team will develop educational material related to space weather, engage K-12 students in science and engineering, and train the next generation of scientists and engineers in the field. The team will also release the resulting framework as open-source software to help speed innovation across the satellite industry.
Mehta founded the ASSIST Lab — standing for “Astrodynamics, Space Science, and Space Technology” — shortly after arriving at WVU in 2018. He also leads the WVU Center for Innovation in Space Exploration and Research, established in 2023, which focuses on space situational and domain awareness, as well as space safety and sustainability. Previous NSF grants have funded his modeling of the Earth’s magnetosphere using artificial intelligence and machine learning and his experimental work on plasma-atmosphere interactions related to space weather forecasting. He is a member of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Space Weather Advisory Group and previously served on the NASA Space Weather Council.
“I’ve invested so much of my life and career on this issue,” he said. “I would really like to be part of the solution.”