Shocking! CME with SEVERE solar storm potential hits Solar Orbiter satellite at 1500 km per second

tech.hindustantimes.com:

After the Earth was struck by two different coronal mass ejection (CME) clouds in successive days, many believed this was the end of the Sun's assault during the week at hand. But another event has shocked the astronomy community. On July 26, a farside flare eruption released an extremely powerful CME and it hit the European Space Agency (ESA) operated Solar Orbiter satellite. Luckily, the CME cloud delivered a glancing blow as it was moving in a different direction, but if it was Earth-directed it could have sparked a severe solar storm event owing to its incredible intensity.

According to a report by SpaceWeather.com, “Two days ago, a bright CME rocketed away from the farside of the sun. Its plane-of-sky speed in SOHO coronagraph images exceeded 1,500 km/s. If this CME had hit Earth, a strong (possibly severe) geomagnetic storm would have surely resulted. Instead, it flew in the opposite direction and hit Europe's Solar Orbiter (SolO) spacecraft”.

This particular CME was recorded traveling at an extreme speed. The report mentions that usually, a CME would take 2 to 3 days to reach where the Solar Orbiter was placed, but it made that journey in just 32 hours. Astronomers are calling it a big solar event, even if the Earth was not involved.

George Ho, a professor at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, and the co-principal investigator for the Energetic Particle Detector suite on Solar Orbiter, told SpaceWeather, “During the 1989 Quebec blackout, it was this type of shock-driven particle increase during the CME arrival that knocked off the power”. According to post-collision data from the Orbiter, 50 MeV ions reached the spacecraft, an increase 10,000 increase from normal.

So far, it is not clear whether the Solar Orbiter