A fleet of sentinel spacecraft, including one with a huge solar sail, could watch out for sneaky "space tornadoes" posing a threat to Earth during solar storms, a new study suggests.

The proposal says that four deep-space spacecraft, collectively called Space Weather Investigation Frontier (SWIFT), could speed up "space weather" warnings by 40%. While three spacecraft would be powered by conventional fuel, the fourth would have a solar sail roughly a third of the size of a football field.

That gigantic sail is needed to stabilize the fourth spacecraft in an unusually difficult orbit that gives it a closer perch to view the sun's activities. But the work will be worth it, scientists emphasize: Faster warnings for powerful, tornado-like plasma structures emerging from the sun would in turn

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