Solar storm destroys dozens of Starlink satellites
Because of a geomagnetic storm on the sun, almost a whole load of new Starlink satellites was destroyed. The damaged missiles crashed in the direction of Earth.
A geomagnetic solar storm destroys up to 40 satellites of Elon Musk's Starlink satellite internet. This was announced by the space company SpaceX in a blog post. It launched the affected spacecraft into orbit on Feb. 3 using a Falcon 9 rocket.
New Starlink satellites are first placed in a comparatively low orbit of about 210 kilometers above the Earth's surface. Only when they are fully operational will they ascend to their operational altitude of approximately 550 kilometers.
Solar storm increases atmospheric density
This fact proved fatal for dozens of new Starlink satellites. Exactly one week after launch, a solar storm occurred. This storm heated up the atmosphere in the lower orbit of the spacecraft in such a way that the atmospheric density in their vicinity increased by up to 50 percent.
The SpaceX control center tried to "effectively protect" the satellites from the storm and aligned them so that they had to contend with as little air resistance as possible. Still, as many as 40 of the 49 new satellites were destroyed. They were already plummeting back toward Earth and burning up - or will. There is no danger to living beings on Earth. The functioning satellites in higher orbit were not damaged. The amount of damage to the destroyed satellites has not been communicated.
New satellites are launched every two weeks
SpaceX has already launched over 2000 Starlink satell ites into orbit so far. Of these, 1469 are active, as Elon Musk confirmed on his Twitter account on January 15, 2022.
The previous batch of Starlink satellites was launched into space on January 18. That mission also carried 49 satellites. Currently, SpaceX flies new Starlink satellites into space circa twice a month. In order to provide fast Internet in remote locations, Musk wants to put a total of 42,000 Starlink satellites into Earth orbit.
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