SAVE THE EARTH FROM ANOTHER CARRINGTON EVENT!
Seek Solutions
Introduction
Seek Solutions aims to develop a tool which will enable mankind to predict and mitigate a once experienced geomagnetic storm – The Carrington Event – which would completely disrupt our way of life today
NASA: International Space Apps Challenge 2022
Seek Solution | © 2022
2
Challenge Outline
Challenge
Value Proposition
Objective
Geomagnetic storms are a scary and harsh reality, often affecting space missions and even our own lives on earth and its our responsibility to try and avoid or at least mitigate the affects of these unavoidable events
Faraday Cup peak solar wind data
ML model
Report & visualize
- Train
- Test
- Stream
Background
The Faraday Cup has long experienced grounding faults along DSCOVR and Wind and possibly other issues that introduce noise, transients, harmonics, and other ugliness into the signal – but why does this matter?
NASA: International Space Apps Challenge 2022
Image Source https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/storms-on-sun.html, image credit : NASA:
Seek Solution | © 2022
3
Geomagnetic Storms
1859 Carrington Event
A geomagnetic storm is a disturbance in the Earth's magnetosphere. It is caused by a solar wind shock wave or cloud of the magnetic field that interacts with the Earth's magnetic field. They are rated on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the weakest and 5 being the strongest.
The largest geomagnetic storms are linked to Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) and the geomagnetic storm of 1859, also called the Carrington storm, was the largest geomagnetic storm ever recorded. It was marked by an intense brightening of auroras and reports of telegraph systems malfunctioning, electrocuting operators.
In today's day and age, such a storm could bring more devastation to earth, due to mankind's dependence on devices and systems that are often connected in one massive 'grid'.
A minor geomagnetic storm on the 3rd of February 2022 caused Elon Musk's Starlink to lose dozens of satellites only a day after they were launched.
Solution Approach
The solution development approach we used was one ubiquitous to data scientists and machine learning practitioners, leveraging statistical reasoning and dynamic time warping to predict solar wind densities, velocities and temperatures
NASA: International Space Apps Challenge 2022
Image sources: https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/outlier_detection.html, , https://towardsdatascience.com/dynamic-time-warping-3933f25fcdd
Seek Solution | © 2022
4
Our solution development approach
Step 1: Data Extraction
Step 2: Data Preprocessing
Step 3: Dynamic Time Warping
Step 4: Model Training
The first step was to extract NASA’s datasets from CDF files into readable data frames which enabled data preprocessing, characteristic management and visualization
Data preprocessing identifies any outliers, or corrupted and interfered data and cleans up the data frames in order to ensure all GiGo effects are mitigated.
In order to align the same particles of measurement from both DSCOVR and Wind, dynamic time warping methods are employed.
The machine learning model makes use of a training, a validation and a testing set in order to appropriately evaluate the performance of the model, often over various folds.
Solution Design
The neural network pipeline will consist of a convolutional long-short term memory cell feed forward neural network. This model aims to predict the solar wind ion density, thermal speed, and velocity vector
NASA: International Space Apps Challenge 2022
Seek Solution | © 2022
5
Fusion Temporal Model
Next Steps
Our ambition is to develop a process pipeline which will be able mitigate the slow manual manifold pipeline currently in place in order to derive the solar wind ion density, thermal speed, and velocity vectors
NASA: International Space Apps Challenge 2022
Image sources: https://earthweb.ess.washington.edu/space/SpaceExp/WIND/, Simultaneous-95-confidence-and-prediction-intervals-The-outer-inner-region_fig2_47675514
Seek Solution | © 2022
6
Our aspirations and next steps
2
1
3
4
Immediate Focus Area
Aspirational Next Steps
Seek Solutions | © 2022
7
Our Experience
The world’s largest hackathon certainly challenged our own perception of teamwork, collaboration and unconventional problem solving. Although the mental stimulation was exhilarating, the friendships made along the way left the deepest mark on this experience. The community really adopted the “There is always room for one more” narrative!
The contributions made by teammates, other teams, subject matter experts and the Discord channel was unparalleled. It was so reassuring to know others were facing the same challenges as you and by working together solved it for not just us, but for the others doing the same challenge.
- “There is always room for one more”
Solution Development
Local �& International Collaboration
Innovation
Introduction
Seek Solutions aims to develop a tool which will enable mankind to predict and mitigate a once experienced geomagnetic storm – The Carrington Event – which would completely disrupt our way of life today
NASA: International Space Apps Challenge 2022
Seek Solution | © 2022
8
Challenge Outline
Challenge
Value Proposition
Objective
Help measure the weather in space based on the DSCOVR data, eliminating background noise and strange data where possible, and predict future space weather.
For each spectrum, the objective is to derive the solar wind ion density, thermal speed, and velocity vector (n,w,v).
?
Predict today's space weather
Faraday Cup peak solar wind data
ML model
Report & visualize
Predict future geomagnetic storms that can assist in implementing contingency plans to help prevent future disastrous events like the Carrington event from 1859.
- Train
- Test
- Stream
Source Data
DSCOVR and ACE Satellites
NASA: International Space Apps Challenge 2022
Seek Solution | © 2022
9