SpaceX loses Starlink satellites after geomagnetic storm

By Trevor Mogg Published April 28, 2022

SpaceX has revealed that it could lose nearly all of the Starlink satellites that it launched last week after a geomagnetic storm disrupted their deployment.

The company said in a post on its website that a day after it deployed 49 Starlink internet satellites on Thursday, February 3, a geomagnetic storm struck Earth’s outer atmosphere. The phenomenon, which occurs when the sun fires off solar flares, resulted in a change in atmospheric density that will cause “up to 40” of the satellites to imminently lose altitude and burn up.

Recommended Videos

SpaceX explained that as with all of its Starlink missions, Thursday’s batch of 49 satellites was originally deployed at an altitude of about 130 miles (210 km), some way below the final operational orbit. This initial position ensures that if a Starlink satellite fails to begin functioning as it should, it will quickly deorbit and burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, thereby preventing it from becoming a piece of hazardous space junk.

But the increased atmospheric density caused by Friday’s geomagnetic storm resulted in atmospheric drag on the satellites far greater than seen with previous launches.

The Starlink team responded by placing the satellites into safe mode to make them fly edge-on “like a sheet of paper” in a move designed to minimize the strength of the drag.

However, data revealed that the drag remained strong enough to prevent the satellites from executing orbit-raising maneuvers, with as many as 40 of the satellites expected to lose altitude and burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.

SpaceX was keen to point out that the satellites pose no collision risk as they lose altitude, adding that no space junk will be created, with no parts crashing to Earth, either.

Since 2019, SpaceX has launched more than 2,000 Starlink satellites for an internet-from-space service that currently has more than 145,000 customers across 25 countries. The main goal is to provide connectivity to remote areas, though the service is open to anyone within a serviceable area.

While a number of Starlink satellites are known to have malfunctioned and burned up in the early stages of deployment during previous missions, this most recent event looks set to be the largest single loss of satellites for SpaceX.

Contributing Editor

Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…

Topics

Space

Starship is finally going orbital, and SpaceX has picked September 22

Flight 14 is aiming for orbit, Starlink V3 deployment and a very long day in space.

Starship rocket.

SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.

Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver

Space

Want a city on the Moon? Scientists say there’s not enough water

A billion tons still comes up short

Artist impression of activities in a Moon Base.

For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.

A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.

Space

NASA’s new telescope can see 100 times more sky than Hubble in a single shot

NASA just launched a $4 billion telescope to map billions of galaxies

NASA Roman Telescope Launch Featured

The Hubble telescope has an almost legendary status. Over the last three decades, Hubble gave us some of the most spectacular close-ups of the universe ever captured, and now, NASA’s newest space telescope wants to see the bigger picture. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope successfully launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:26 a.m. EDT on August 30. Roman is now beginning a roughly three-month journey toward the Sun-Earth L2 point, nearly a million miles away, where it will spend its primary five-year mission surveying huge portions of the cosmos.

Roman carries a 2.4-meter primary mirror, the same diameter as Hubble’s, but its Wide Field Instrument can capture a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble’s. NASA expects it to use that combination of sharpness and scale to map billions of galaxies, study dark matter and dark energy, and discover enormous numbers of previously unknown worlds.