"If we can’t get the data, no matter how good it is, within a few minutes of when it is sampled, it’s of little value," Kunches said. "So many things happen so quickly…we need data as fast as possible," he said.

A new NOAA Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite is to be lofted in a few months, Kunches said. It will carry an x-ray imager designed to relay pictures of the Sun every minute to a couple of minutes, day or night Earth time.

"We’ll be able to watch in x-ray all kinds of things, at a cadence that we’ve never seen before," Kunches said.

During solar storms the number and energy of electrons and ions increase. When a satellite zips through such an energized environment, the charged particles can wreak havoc with electronic components, harming and possibly disabling them.

"You can get phantom commands," said David Desrocher, director of The Aerospace Corporation’s Space Operations Support Office in Colorado Springs, Colorado. "That could result in attitude-control loss. Most of these upsets are momentary and are not typically fatal or very destructive," he said.

However, such problems can impact day-to-day operations and efficiencies in managing spacecraft, Desrocher said.

The Aerospace Corporation has been busy at work helping the U.S. Air Force Space Command to better deal with and understand space weather phenomena, Desrocher said. Ferreting out what’s background from the space environment to discern an attack on military space assets is part of the assignment, he said.

The idea that manufacturers are cranking out spacecraft that feel no pain from space weather effects is not true, Desrocher said.

"That’s not the case. They can do a pretty good job and there are several things you can do design-wise to mitigate the effects. But you're not going to build an impervious satellite," Desrocher said.

There is a booming business in watching solar explosions.

Sun-triggered geomagnetic storms and increased solar ultraviolet emission heat Earth’s upper atmosphere, causing it to expand. This results in increased drag on satellites in space. Unless low Earth satellites are regularly boosted to higher orbits, drag slows down the spacecraft, causing them to eventually tumble to terra firma.

"Space weather affects the performance and certainly the rate at which you repopulate your satellites," said Larry Plummer, managing partner for Earth2Sun International LLC, in Westminster, Colorado -- an association of companies offering a variety of space weather services.

"Space weather is a real issue for the investment community," Plummer said. The science of space weather is meshing with economics, he said, with a correlation between sizes of storms and their impact in terms of dollars.

Keeping tabs on space environmental changes can enable satellite operators to reboost their assets at a time when Earth’s atmosphere is thinnest, thus saving precious propellant. That adds more life to the satellite, in turn, yielding added revenue, Plummer said.

Plummer said that satellite operators think spacecraft builders have "designed out" troublesome problems that might be spurred by space weather. "That’s like saying we’ve made mobile homes safe from tornadoes," he said.

Also, you have spacecraft operators that don’t publicly signal use of weather data for fear of implying to customers there’s anything at risk for their systems, Plummer said.

"Your spacecraft may not blow up due to space weather. But if you interrupt five minutes of the Super Bowl being broadcast through your satellite, that’s a huge financial loss," Plummer said.