A geomagnetic storm may have effectively destroyed 40 SpaceX Starlink satellites

Let’s go into detail A geomagnetic storm may have effectively destroyed 40 SpaceX Starlink satellites , here SpaceX’s most recent Starlink launch didn’t go as planned. According to a news release yesterday, they are going to lose 40 of the 49 satellites they’ve launched, which is 80 percent in the coming days. More satellites are going to be removed.   

If they haven’t already orbited and this is due to an unfortunate solar event, which they didn’t actually anticipate the impacts of yes Starlink Group 47, launched on 3 February, have demonstrated, that it is passing south. But went where they had to.Perform this dog-leg maneuver after the second stage landed on a barge that had reached around the Bahamas and had its own problems with recovery but seemed to return safely to port. So they go up in class.

  They initially put it in a low orbit like 330 by 220 kilometers and then they deploy the satellites and they do it somewhat randomly because they do this in order to reduce the amount of hardware needed. Ying and means that satellites orbit very slowly and allow their ion thrusters to detach before they begin to light up to raise their orbits to their target orbits.  

They were in the middle of a solar storm. Now solar storms happen all the time and are usually a problem for satellites in very high orbits, not just Starlink that is deep inside the magnetosphere, but lots outside the magnetosphere. Charged particles arrive. Far away from the Sun at very high energies and they can hit sensitive electronics inside satellites, they can cause single bit errors.  

They require you to reset the corrupted processor data and can be more drastic on hardware than on computers that are outside the magnetosphere. It’s deep inside the magnetosphere I mean if you look at the International Space Station they use consumer grade instruments that are essential unchanged you know we see them using iPads and we saw Yusuke Maizawa on his Have seen using iPhone and Inspire 4.  

Even apple clocks that have absolutely tiny processes work fine because they’re deep inside the magnetosphere and protected from these solar protons events that weren’t a problem, the problem is that when you have If a solar flare occurs it is a very energetic event and it releases and amplifies a lot of extra ultraviolet radiation not only in the radiation but directly in the black body thermal spectrum.  

A few percent of the Sun’s luminosity and that extra bright that additional heat and radiation can heat the upper atmosphere and expand it outwards, so the upper atmosphere is called the thermosphere. It is about five to six hundred kilometers from the carbon line. is the region of the atmosphere where it is mainly composed of dissociated atoms, true oxygen and nitrogen being the main components but they are monoatomic.    

So they’re monoatomic and they don’t kill each other very often they’re not very good at emitting any energy that they get, but when they get energy from you they split apart, they give you energy Know that the thermosphere has to be around because it is much hotter than the layers below the mesosphere.   

This also means that the density of this atmosphere can change when the Sun’s brightness changes rapidly, so it can expand outward when it receives a little more energy and then contracts inward. And this can happen on the time scale of hours, so when SpaceX launched they found their satellites were passing through about 50 denser atmospheres than any previous Starlink op launch.  

I think it was decided that they would put the satellites in safe mode while they waited for the atmospheric density to drop and so they basically turn flat satellites and you cruise them through the atmosphere lets do. reducing the amount of drag while they waited for things to change, however apparently they had some issues when they tried to take them out of this mode, so I guess what happens, they It needs to be able to turn on.  

one orientation and they do it using magnetarkers and reaction wheels and these aren’t particularly powerful but they’re fine for you know things in the vacuum of space except the lower atmosphere it’s just that they take away their reaction The wheels and magnetarkers that Starlink had could not turn into an orientation in order for their solar panels to be positioned properly.  

could start raising their orbit and that meant they landed without being able to raise their orbit and they’re not going to be able to get out of it and so yeah, uh 40 out of 49 but supposedly Those are the numbers we’ve seen that they won’t be able to make it into space or be able to make it to higher orbits where e they can actually turn on. 

SpaceX has put out a press release about this and they basically said well it proves that SpaceX are good protectors of low earths if they go up then our spacecraft go into orbit and They find that the technical problems are right away then they de-orbit very quickly.

  That’s certainly true of this group, although it’s not what SpaceX wanted to demonstrate they wanted to orbit their satellites and actually operate it is interesting given that it’s one of the lower insertions . You’ve looked in recent years and you know that if you look at Jonathan McDowell in time, of course you know the Guardians of All Basically in space, he sees this orbital cop.  It has all the best graphs and you can see from its graph the deployment height and variations in Atmospheric Density which is obtained based on solar luminosity data from the past few years.

Future launches would have to choose to launch in slightly higher orbits during this time to avoid these high drag scenarios as this launch experienced conditions that were 50 more than any previous Starlink launch.We’re still a long way from getting to know you solar maximum.We’re going to see a change in the sun in the coming years that’s going to lead to a more dense upper atmosphere, this is actually something that happened with Skylab.

Of course Skylab was launched and left in orbit under the assumption that the Space Shuttle would come online and be able to.To promote it to a higher orbit, though a higher one which is more energetic than the predicted solar maximum.The Earth’s atmosphere is moving outwards and due to the increased pull, Skylab eventually falls down and de-orbits before orbiting.

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