On February 3, the Falcon 9 rocket with 49 star-chain satellites entered orbit at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) on Florida's east coast. About nine minutes after launch, the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket landed safely on the deck of the SpaceX unmanned ship, which is located in the Atlantic Ocean, hundreds of miles east of KSC.
This is already the third Starlink launch in 2022, after the company made two launches in January. As a result, SpaceX seems to be moving quickly to establish its constellation and expand further into rural areas to improve internet service.
SpaceX eventually hopes to have as many as 42,000 moons in this so-called giant constellation. As of early January 2022, SpaceX has launched more than 1,900 Starlink satellites. According to Starlink guidelines, as part of a beta test plan with download speeds between 100 Mb/s and 200 Mb/s and latencies as low as 20 milliseconds.
But just one day after launch on Feb. 3, SpaceX lost as many as 40 new Starlink satellites due to a geomagnetic storm. This is because during geomagnetic storms, currents in the ionosphere of the Earth's atmosphere, as well as high-energy particles deposited into the ionosphere, increase energy in the form of heat, which in turn increases the density and density distribution of the upper atmosphere, creating additional resistance orbits for satellites on low Earths.
As a result, SpaceX said, these additional drags prevented the Satellites from leaving safe mode to begin their orbital lift maneuvers, so that up to 40 satellites would re-enter or have re-entered the Earth's atmosphere.
In addition, local heating produces a strong horizontal change in the density of the ionosphere, which changes the path of the radio signal and creates errors in the positioning information provided by gps.
The culprit of the geomagnetic storm was the M1 solar flare that occurred on January 30. From a sunspot called AR2936, it lasted a particularly long time, lasting more than four hours. According to the European Space Agency, a Class M solar flare is a medium-sized space weather event that could cause temporary radio disruptions on Earth.
At the same time, the solar coronal mass ejection (CME) that accompanies solar flares sends large quantities of high-energy charged particles from the sun to Earth. It is these "uninvited guests" who disturb the Earth's magnetic field and cause magnetic storms.
So how terrible is the sun's wrath?
Counting the worst solar activity in years, there was the Carrington Incident of 1859. The event was the first recorded solar flare to hit Earth. The event occurred at 11:18 a.m. ET on Sept. 1 and was named after solar astronomer Richard Carrington, who witnessed the event through his own private observatory telescope and sketched the sunspots of the time. NASA scientists say the flare is the largest solar storm recorded in the past 500 years.
Above: Richard Carrington's sunspots drawn on September 1, 1859.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Storm Carrington event triggered a major aurora display as far away as the southern Caribbean. According to NASA, it also caused severe disruptions to global telegraph communications, even shocked some telegraph operators, and sparked fires when lines were discharged to ignite telegrams.
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Elon Musk can be said to have saved money to the extreme, so the quality problem of the Starlink satellite is not a star and a half. And I haven't heard of other satellite networks losing 40 directly because of a solar flare. In addition, Starlink is like a space rogue, repeatedly touching the Chinese space station, as well as European satellites.
Even more disgusting, in August 2021, British space debris expert Hugh Lewis said that starlink satellites are a single major source of low-Earth orbit collision risk. According to calculations, Starlink satellites participate in about 1,600 encounters each week between two spacecraft less than 1 kilometer apart. This is about 50% of all such incidents.
And with each new batch of satellites launched into space, that number increases. By the time StarLink has deployed all 12,000 satellites of the first generation constellation, that number could reach 90 percent. So for the Starlink satellites, it is necessary for us to remain vigilant.