More than a dozen coronal mass ejections - eruptions of super-heated gas triggered by tangled magnetic fields on the Sun's surface - shot from the star over a period of 20 days last October and November.
Martian impact
A few hours after reaching Earth, the blasts hit Mars, which has no global magnetic field to shield it from solar storms. The events disabled a radiation-monitoring instrument on the orbiting spacecraft Mars Odyssey. And computer simulations suggest they also blew off part of the planet's upper atmosphere, an effect that may have helped erode the planet's surface water over 3.5 billion years.
"We know there used to be a lot more water than there is right now. Where did it go?" Zurbuchen said. "One of the key ideas people are talking about is the connection to these space storms."
"If the blast wave still has enough energy at that point, it can cause the interstellar material to radiate radio waves, which can tell us how far it is to the edge of interstellar space," said Ed Stone of the California Institute of Technology.
Researchers say predicting space storms has come a long way in recent years - they got a little advance warning in 2003 by measuring vibrations on the Sun's surface from sunspots on the far side of the star. And using computer models, scientists accurately predicted when the blasts would reach the Voyager 2 probe, accounting for the slowing effects of interstellar material.
"We got it to within a day," said Justin Kasper of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The neat thing is our models are getting sophisticated enough we can model out to the heliosphere."
I bet it is all due to global warming. Martians need to give up their SUV's and sign the Kyoto Accord now! ;D