Amazon Web Services enlists AI to help NASA get ahead of solar superstorms

If the sun throws out a radiation blast of satellite-killing proportions someday, Amazon Web Services may well play a role in heading off a technological doomsday. That's the upshot of a project that has NASA working with AWS Professional Services and the Amazon Machine Learning Solutions Lab to learn more about the early warning signs of a solar superstorm, with the aid of artificial intelligence. Solar storms occur when disturbances on the sun's surface throw off a blasts of radiation and eruptions of electrically charged particles at speeds of millions of miles per hour. A sufficiently strong radiation blast can impact radio communications over half of the globe. And if the eruptions, known as coronal mass ejection or CMEs, are strong enough and sweep directly past Earth, they can damage satellites and bring down power grids.