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The earliest investigations of how solar storms affect our technology began in the mid-1800's. The appearance of large sunspots was found to be correlated with intense aurora, and with telegraph outages.
Since then, scientists have explored and theorized about the many ways in which solar activity can cause communications outages, electrical power blackouts and excess radiation exposure to astronauts and even commercial airline passengers and flight crews.
Space weather research spans both the scientific research community, who are trying to understand the Sun-Earth system, and engineering community who are trying to understand how specific technological systems are affected. Because solar flares can increase radiation exposure to astronauts, NASA has been investigating space weather and its mitigation since the beginning of the Space Age.
Most scientists working in this complex area are supported by a variety of research grants from NASA and from the National Science Foundation. The research is routinely published in the open literature. The Department of Defense and many commercial industries (e.g. satellite and electric power) also have research programs to forecast space weather and its impacts, however, this research is generally classified and not openly published.
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