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wanderlustcub t1_j6n9e1r wrote

I wouldn’t call 4 months time “narrowly avoided”. That’s a third of Earth’s orbit after all.

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KmartQuality t1_j6omryq wrote

There's no special reason the flight wouldn't have been aloft 4 months earlier or the flare happened 4 months later.

Substitute 18 years (or 4 days) for 4 months and the sentence is the same.

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rocketsocks t1_j6pa4gg wrote

There wasn't exactly a fixed schedule for Apollo missions, they could happen during any time of the year (within the launch windows during each lunar period, of course), there's nothing that would have prevented a launch from happening during that 4 month period other than just luck. The operational cadence of the program resulted in no missions happening at that time, but they could have.

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EricFromOuterSpace OP t1_j6n9oq9 wrote

I read it as narrow, like, in cosmic time.

If you're talking about getting unlucky with the sun, 4 months is pretty narrow.

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wanderlustcub t1_j6nbmi5 wrote

But we are talking space weather, which is much more dynamic and fluid. That timescale is more on the par of days. Sometimes hours. That’s why I felt it was a strange phrase to use.

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EricFromOuterSpace OP t1_j6nc9hk wrote

Gotcha — yea you are probably right that space weather is chaotic and something is happening all the time, but this one seems to have been particularly intense:

A series of intense solar flares exploded intermittently for more than a week. A solar flare is an outburst of charged particles from the Sun’s turbulent surface. There are five classes: A, B, C, M, and X, ranging in size from the smallest to the most dangerous. The intense solar storm of 1972, which was an X-class flare, originated from a sunspot named MR 11976.

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