According to the update of spaceX official website on the 8th, affected by geomagnetic storms, of the 49 "starlink" satellites launched by SpaceX last week, it is expected that as many as 40 will not be able to deploy the orbit correctly, declaring "scrap".
On the afternoon of February 3, EST, SpaceX launched a batch of "Starlink" satellites from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to low Earth orbit through the Falcon 9 rocket, and the second stage of the rocket sent the satellite into a predetermined orbit, and its perigee was about 210 kilometers above the earth, and the satellite needed to ascend to orbit by itself.
SpaceX said each satellite achieved controlled flight. However, the next day, the satellites suffered a severe geomagnetic storm, which caused the atmosphere to warm and increase in density, and the atmospheric resistance increased by 50% compared with the launch. According to the Space Weather Forecast Center, which is affiliated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the geomagnetic storm was caused by a solar storm on January 30, and the resulting stream of high-energy particles finally reached its low-Earth orbit on February 2, eventually causing geomagnetic disturbances.
"Starlink" satellites
According to the website, the "Starlink" team immediately directed the satellite into safe mode, flying edge-on to minimize atmospheric drag and effectively avoid magnetic storms, while working closely with ground laboratories to obtain the latest situation of the satellite through radar monitoring. However, preliminary analysis shows that under the current resistance, it is difficult for satellites to leave safety mode and start to maneuver up orbit, and as many as 40 satellites will re-enter or have re-entered the Earth's atmosphere.
SpaceX said it chose to deploy satellites in low-Earth orbit to ensure rapid processing in the unlikely event of a malfunction. It turned out that it was this orbital design that made the satellites more susceptible to magnetic storms at the site.
SpaceX also said in the statement that the risk of collision between these de-orbiting satellites and other satellites is zero, because according to the design, the satellites will die out once they enter the atmosphere (demise), and there will be no orbital debris, and no satellite debris will fall to the ground. SpaceX said this shows that the StarLink team has made a great effort to ensure that debris in orbit is reduced. The Starlink project has long been criticized by astronomers for saturating the detectors researchers use to capture images of the night sky, leaving pinstripes that destroy pixels in the images and hinder astronomical observations.
According to a 2020 report by Aviation Week, Musk has said that the marginal cost of reusing Falcon 9 is about $15 million (about 95.43 million yuan). Previously, it was reported that Musk had hinted that the manufacturing cost of a single "Starlink" satellite was much less than $500,000.
These hard-losing satellites are the third batch of "Starlink" satellites launched by SpaceX this year, and the 36th batch of "Starlink" satellites deployed by its special networking. Since launching the project in May 2019, SpaceX has launched nearly 2,100 Starlink satellites cumulatively, of which more than 1,800 are still in orbit.