Doom for SpaceX. At least 40 of the 49 satellites launched last week by Elon Musk’s company for the Starlink satellite internet system were destroyed by a geomagnetic storm caused by a large solar flare.
According to the announcement published on Tuesday on the company’s blog, the satellites were hit last Friday, February 4, a day after they were put on a preliminary “low” orbit about 210 kilometers away from Earth.
The launch of satellites with a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA, coincided in time with the warning issued last Wednesday and Thursday by the US Space Weather Forecast Center for an impending geomagnetic storm.
The warning said that on January 29, a large solar flare was detected – a solar plasma explosion and emission of electromagnetic radiation – and it was possible that the solar storm would reach Earth by February 1. According to the same source, the geomagnetic storm was expected to affect the Earth by February 3, although weakened.
Astrophysicist: This is unprecedented, at least as far as I know
According to SpaceX, the speed and intensity of the solar storm raised the temperature in the Earth’s atmosphere, thus increasing the atmospheric density to the low altitude of the satellites, causing intense friction or attraction that neutralized at least 40 satellites.
Starlink operators tried to put the satellites in a different “safe-mode” orbit to minimize traction, but these attempts failed in most cases, resulting in lower layers of the atmosphere where they burned, according to SpaceX.
“This is unprecedented, at least as far as I know,” Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, told Reuters. He said it was the first time he had heard of problems with satellites due to the increase in atmospheric density from a solar storm, instead of the high electromagnetic radiation itself.
Los Angeles-based aerospace technology company SpaceX was founded by billionaire Elon Musk. Since 2019, it has launched hundreds of small satellites into orbit around the Earth as part of Musk’s Starlink service for broadband internet connection. The company envisions succeeding in creating a “constellation” of 12,000 satellites.
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