Europe's space agency plans to launch a space-weather satellite

A few years from now, we might have the power to make more accurate space weather forecasts thanks to an ESA satellite. The European Space Agency plans to launch a solar-monitoring space weather probe in 2023 to keep an eye out for Coronal Mass Ejections (CME), and it's hoping to send it to a stable orbit called the Lagrange point 5. That location will give the satellite a unique side-on view of the surface of the sun that's bound to face Earth in four to five days. CMEs are enormous and powerful eruptions of plasma and magnetic field from the sun's corona, which can cause widescale blackouts. By getting a glimpse of possible CMEs, astronomers could raise a warning much earlier than we're used to and help power grid companies prepare. It's pretty hard to predict them, though, so astronomers still won't be able to say when exactly one will erupt even with the probe in place. More

(Source: Engadget - Jan 23)