The Sun Fires a Big Flare & Solar Storm Towards Mars & Ingenuity | Space Weather News 04.19.2021

This week our Sun picks up the pace with an extended blast of fast solar wind from a large coronal hole. We have been storming over the weekend and it should continue through the early part of this week, especially at high latitudes. This means aurora photographers have a chance to catch more aurora views before things settle down. In addition, we have another sunspot cluster on the Earth-facing Sun and multiple smaller bright regions emerging. These regions are keeping the solar flux boosted into the high 70s on Earth’s dayside. This means we will continue to enjoy a boost in radio propagation this week on Earth’s dayside. Along with that, we also have a big region on the Sun’s farside that fired a large flare over the weekend and launched a solar storm towards Mars. Hopefully, this solar storm will not be a problem for Ingenuity as it preps for it’s first flights on the Red Planet. Learn more details about this solar storm and how it might affect the Mars helicopter, see how long this ongoing storming at Earth will last, and find out what else our Sun has in store this week.