scostep 2010 (stp12) - Leibniz-Institut für Atmosphärenphysik an der ...

STP12 Abstracts
Berlin, 12 - 16 July 2010
SCOSTEP Symposium 2010
Analysis of the Effect of Geomagnetic Storm on Nigeriasat-1
Gajere Efron 1 , Jayeiola Paul, Taiwo Qudus
1 National Centre for Remote Sensing, Jos, 2
The earth’s magnetic field alters the flow of charged particles supplied by the Sun for many
hundreds of Earth’s radius out into space. These charged particles are trapped by magnetic
field of the Earth; the region affected is called the Earth’s magnetosphere. The magnetosphere
act like a buffer between the earth and solar wind, which flows over and around it, the solar
wind compressed the earth’s field on the day- side and stretches it on the night side in a long
magnetic field.
The NigeriaSat-1 is a sun-synchronous satellite and Sun-synchronous orbit satellite trails the
Earth’s shadow and never enter into the Earth’s shadow(Night-time), The Satellite always
have Solar wind perpetually striking it, because it received the Sun-light at all time. The
satellite is perpetually at the day side of the Earth which always prone to the effects of
compression of the Earth’s magnetic field by solar wind resulting to Geomagnetic storms.
Therefore Sun-synchronous orbital satellite may suffer from effects that are predominantly
during geomagnetic storm, so an investigation of the intense geomagnetic storms effects and
the ionospheric storms was carried out on Nigeria Sat-1
The ionospheric data used in this study consists of hourly values of foF2 obtained from some
of the National Geophysical Data Center’s SPIDR (Space Physics Interactive Data
Resource). The interplanetary parameters data are the Proton Number Density, Proton
pressure, the Solar Wind Flow Speed, Plasma Temperature, the Interplanetary Magnetic Field
Bz and Geomagnetic index Dst.
The result of this study shows that Nigeriasat-1 is immune against the atmospheric drag,
gravitational pull and electrostatic discharge.