Huge solar flares hit far-flung craft

From Montreal, at a joint meeting of the American and Canadian Geophysical Unions

Spacecraft distributed throughout the solar system, including one launched more than a quarter-century ago and now billions of kilometers from Earth, have detected material spewed into space by a spate of huge solar flares late last year.

In October 2003, large, chaotic regions of magnetic activity on the sun began triggering what became a series of at least 60 solar flares, says Nat Gopalswamy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.