The research of the possible effect of cosmic rays on sentinel satellite data

Ionizing radiation sources such as Solar Energetic Particles and Galactic Cosmic Radiations can produce unpredictable errors in imaging and communication systems of satellites. In this research, in order to scrutinize the potential effects caused by the errors in the electromagnetic wave signals or electronic system, a comparative study was conducted between the temporal variation of the speckle values on Sentinel 1 satellite images and the cosmic ray intensity/count data. The two processes which are fundamental for using the radar data in a meaningful way are the calibration process and the filtration of the speckle effect which also reduces the image quality. After the code generation via the Google Earth Engine interface, these pre-processes were applied to all datasets. These datasets from January 2015 to December 2019 were obtained in close locations to cosmic ray stations. Subsequently the cosmic ray count intensity data with its monthly temporal resolution and the monthly means of the value differences between the processed data and the raw data were compared. When the change over time graphs of the two data sets are analysed together, it has been seen that they follow similar trend which grows steadily. Afterwards, the Pearson correlation analysis was performed between two data sets in order to detect the correlation level and the direction between them, a high degree significant correlation which is between 62% and 78% for the relevant stations has been obtained.