Research programme
The mission exists for an operational reason, but the measurements it produces answer questions that have been open since the corona was first photographed.
Three questions
Each has an operational consequence, which is why a forecasting mission can afford to ask them.
Coronal mass ejections rarely travel straight. Seen from the side, the deflection can be measured directly rather than reconstructed from a halo, which is the single largest source of forecast error today.
Active regions grow for days before rotating into view. Magnetography from L5 turns that blind week into a catalogue with numbers attached.
Plasma leaving the Sun arrives hotter than adiabatic expansion allows. In-situ instruments at L5 sample a stream that near-Earth monitors will meet five days later.
Data policy
No proprietary period, no embargo, no instrument team privilege. Calibrated products reach the public archive within one hour of downlink.
Consequences on the ground
A severe event is not an abstraction. It is induced current in transformers, degraded positioning, and radiation dose at 11 000 metres.
Geomagnetically induced currents saturate transformer cores. Operators need eight hours to reconfigure a network safely.
Polar routes lose high-frequency communication and accumulate radiation dose. Rerouting a long-haul schedule takes twelve hours.
Drag increases, single-event upsets multiply. Fleet operators put spacecraft into safe mode and postpone manoeuvres.
Ionospheric disturbance degrades precision navigation, which surveying, agriculture and rail signalling all depend on.
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