What are the risks posed by space weather events to satellite operations? Suggest measures for resilience.

Space weather — solar flares, coronal mass ejections and the resulting geomagnetic storms — perturbs the near-Earth environment on which satellites depend. As India's orbital assets multiply under private participation, space weather resilience has moved from a scientific curiosity to an operational and economic necessity.

Risks to satellite operations

• Radiation damage to electronics: energetic particles cause single-event upsets and permanent degradation of onboard systems. The Bengaluru start-up GalaxEye lost contact with Mission Drishti, the world's first OptoSAR satellite, after storm-induced radiation affected a critical system during its Launch and Early Orbit Phase (LEOP) [1].
• Increased atmospheric drag: storms heat and expand the upper atmosphere, raising drag on low-Earth-orbit satellites, hastening orbital decay and forcing costly station-keeping manoeuvres [2].
• Loss of tracking and collision safety: after major storms NORAD must re-identify hundreds of objects, since drag modelling is the largest uncertainty in orbit determination — weakening conjunction assessment in an increasingly crowded LEO [2].
• Communication and navigation disruption: ionospheric scintillation degrades satellite links and GNSS positioning, affecting aviation, shipping and precision agriculture [3].
• Power and attitude anomalies: surface and internal charging can damage solar arrays and disorient spacecraft.

Measures for resilience

• Forecasting and early warning: strengthen space-weather prediction using Aditya-L1, India's observatory-class solar mission at L1, which continuously watches solar activity [4]; institutionalise alerts to operators.
• Engineering safeguards: mandatory radiation-hardened components, shielding, redundancy and safe-mode protocols, particularly for start-up-built satellites.
• Regulatory standards: IN-SPACe, the authorising body under the Indian Space Policy 2023, can prescribe space-weather design and testing norms for private operators [5].
• Operational practice: pre-storm manoeuvre planning, payload safing, and constellation-level redundancy.
• International cooperation: data sharing with NOAA and ISO space-weather frameworks.

Space weather is an unavoidable natural hazard, but its consequences are largely manageable through anticipation and design. Treating space-weather resilience as core infrastructure protection — much as India treats disaster preparedness — will let its expanding public–private space economy grow securely and support the technological self-reliance the Indian Space Policy 2023 envisages.