A study of the effect of different solar wind streams on spacecraft functioning

The paper suggests that spacecraft equipment failures in the near-Earth environment may be caused by one of the following types of streams coming to the Earth’s orbit: (a) slow solar wind in the streamer belt or chains; (b) sporadic solar wind; (c) proton flux with an energy of E > 60 MeV. The laws of solar-terrestrial physics derived to date allow sufficiently reliable determination of the sources of these streams on the Sun as well as fairly precise calculation of their parameters and time of arrival at the Earth’s orbit. We have concluded that spacecraft maintenance and extension of their service life require timely and fairly accurate information regarding the onset of an adverse environmental effect on spacecraft. A successful solution to the problem depends mainly on the current state of the art of research and development in solar-terrestrial, ionospheric, and magnetospheric physics.