National Institute of Telecommunications

The guest speaker was Dr Grzegorz Nykiel, an expert from the German Aerospace Center (DLR), who took the audience on a journey through phenomena collectively known as “space weather” — and showed that this subject is much more down-to-earth than it might seem.

The seminar was opened by Prof. Mariusz J. Figurski, Deputy Director of NIT for Scientific Affairs, who emphasised that although the issue is sometimes treated as secondary, its importance is growing along with technological development and the increasing dependence of states on satellite systems. From the outset, attention was drawn to the fact that recent years — a period of increased solar activity — have brought real disruptions to satellite transmissions and revealed the scale of the problem.

Although it sounds like a term from science fiction, space weather has a very specific definition. As Dr Nykiel explained, it is “everything that happens on the Sun and in interplanetary space that affects Earth — technology, satellites, and even human life”.

The key “culprit” is, of course, the Sun. Its activity changes in cycles, and periods of maximum activity mean more flares and mass ejections. “What happens on the Sun determines whether we ‘suffer’ less or more,” the speaker said, reminding the audience that we are still feeling the effects of one such cycle.

These phenomena — solar flares and so-called coronal mass ejections — carry enormous amounts of energy and charged particles. Their scale is difficult to imagine. Such a flare has energy equivalent to a billion hydrogen bombs, Dr Nykiel emphasised.

What is most fascinating, and at the same time unsettling, is how phenomena occurring hundreds of millions of kilometres away translate into the everyday functioning of infrastructure.

Before a satellite signal reaches a receiver, it must pass through the ionosphere — a layer of the atmosphere particularly sensitive to solar radiation. This is where phenomena occur that can distort the signal, cause positioning errors, and in extreme cases make reception completely impossible.

When violent phenomena occur, receivers can simply lose the signal,

said Dr Nykiel.

Importantly, the problem does not concern only precise geodetic systems. In ordinary devices — phones or navigation systems — errors can reach several or even several dozen metres, and sometimes positioning becomes impossible altogether.

One of the strongest points of the seminar was the scale of our dependence on GNSS systems, including GPS, Galileo, and others.

Essentially every element of our lives is now dominated by GNSS,

the speaker noted.

This is not only navigation on a phone. It is time synchronisation in financial systems, the operation of critical infrastructure, transport and logistics, precision agriculture, and military systems. A failure or degradation of these systems is therefore not a technical curiosity, but a potential economic-scale problem. One example? GPS disruptions in agriculture in the United States translated into losses of hundreds of millions of dollars — and that was only one sector.

Although the subject is sometimes perceived as abstract, history provides very concrete examples:

• the Carrington Event of 1859 — a solar storm so powerful that telegraph lines operated without power,
• the blackout in Canada in 1989 — 6 million people without electricity for many hours,
• 1967 — disruptions almost interpreted as a nuclear attack,
• in February 2022, between 4 and 10 February, SpaceX lost 40 low-orbit Starlink satellites as a result of a geomagnetic storm following a coronal eruption on the Sun.

These stories show one thing: the problem is not hypothetical — it simply rarely makes front-page news.

The seminar also brought an important reflection: why is space weather discussed so rarely?

It is not a media-friendly topic — until something spectacular happens,

the speaker observed.

As long as the aurora borealis is only a beautiful phenomenon in photographs, the subject remains niche. The problem begins when the same phenomenon causes communication disruptions, infrastructure failures, or real financial losses.

Can we defend ourselves against cosmic “bad weather”? Yes — but not completely.

There are supporting systems and alternative navigation solutions, but — as emphasised during the discussion — they are costly and often insufficient as replacements. “For a long time, we will remain dependent on satellite systems,” Dr Nykiel noted, pointing among other things to their unique role in time synchronisation.

At the same time, systems for monitoring and forecasting space weather are being developed. The problem is that, as the speaker admitted, “we will never have enough data” to fully predict these phenomena.

Yesterday’s seminar at NIT showed very clearly that the boundary between space and the everyday functioning of the state practically does not exist.

Phenomena occurring on the Sun may affect whether GPS works, whether we have electricity, and whether emergency services can communicate. And although the topic remains “not very media-friendly”, its importance will only grow — along with our dependence on technology.

In short: space stopped being distant a long time ago.