Sun Fires X-ray Shot at Earth, CME on the Way
http://news.discovery.com/space/sun-blasts-x-class-flare-right-at-earth-120712.html
This probably won’t matter, I believe the CME (coronal mass ejection) is such that other than auroras where won’t be much impact, but I thought it might interest a few of my reader(s). This is the biggest thing that makes human exploration of the solar system so problematic. With the Earth’s huge magnetic field and atmosphere protecting us, we can pretty much ignore such events, even with our highly electronics dependent society. However, if you are out in some tin can floating about in between the planets, that is a totally different story and you could easily become dead in just a few hours if you get smacked by one of these things. They will have to develop some form of effective shielding (recall that everything lifted by NASA out of our gravity well costs on the order of $10,000 a pound) before we can seriously expect to get a real presence in space (the space station is a joke).
