Icefox wrote:Hmm... Light takes 8 minutes to go from the sun to Earth. If I recall rightly, charged particles in solar wind move about 1/3 the speed of light. So you have something like 15 minutes between seeing a flare and "buttoning down for the storm". Since the probe is already almost to Jupiter, which is 5 AU away, the solar flare would probably take almost two hours to reach it.
As today's comic shows, we are thinking backwards on this. Liny is already inside Jupiter's sizeable Magnetosphere. And the storm is radiating backwards off of the same, which is creating an effective shield that prevents Lindy from talking back like a spoilt child.
Imagine not a transitive EM-Pulse, but a stable barrier. It would be an effective communication shield.
Maybe, in the interest of national security, the feds should develop something like this to set up around the Pentagon? (It should also effectively disable incoming aircraft, which are run mostly by electronics...)
Here's a thought... would the EM barrier disable Lindy's electronics as it passed through it? Or did it begin after Lindy entered the protection of the magnetosphere?
-=T "amateur astronomer" K
