NASA Solar Shield will likely get its chance soon enough.

They’re out there, biding their time. Waiting patiently. And when you least expect it, they’re going to plunge you and everyone you care about into total darkness. 

Luckily, we can see solar storms coming from about 93 million miles away, and NASA is now in the process of creating a “Solar Shield” that should be able to minimize the damage to power grids caused by electromagnetic disturbances in the atmosphere and ground caused by foul weather on the sun.

But NASA has a plan to battle these blackouts with blackouts. If transformers are offline at the time the storm hits they will not be affected, so the trick is to figure out where and when a storm is going to hit before it reaches the atmosphere. To do that, NASA’s SOHO and two STEREO spacecraft identify a coronal mass ejection (CME) heading toward earth and create a 3-D image of it, allowing researchers to characterize its strength and determine when it will hit.

Solar Shield is experimental at this point, and its hard to know how successful it will be, mainly because it hasn’t had the trial by fire it needs to see if it works. Solar weather has been fairly quiet this year, so the team hasn’t been able to gather the data it needs. But considering we’re going into a period of increased solar activity (solar weather ebbs and flows cyclically) that will peak in 2013, Solar Shield will likely get its chance soon enough.

[NASA Science News]