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One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

earthsky.org

211–220 of 347 posts

Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#211
post #130

This article has a somewhat alarmist tone, but isn't this just Starlink working as intended? It seems much better for an old non-functional Starlink satellite to burn up in the atmosphere instead of continuing in an uncontrolled orbit. I believe most burn-ups are controlled intentional deorbits.

> This article has a somewhat alarmist tone, but isn't this just Starlink working as intended?

The unexpected accumulation of metals in the stratosphere, discussed in the article, is clearly not intended.

> It seems much better for an old non-functional Starlink satellite to burn up in the atmosphere instead of continuing in an uncontrolled orbit. I believe most burn-ups are controlled intentional deorbits.

This is irrelevant to metals like aluminium accumulating in the stratosphere.

Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#212
post #130

This article has a somewhat alarmist tone, but isn't this just Starlink working as intended? It seems much better for an old non-functional Starlink satellite to burn up in the atmosphere instead of continuing in an uncontrolled orbit. I believe most burn-ups are controlled intentional deorbits.

Indeed, working as intended. SpaceX said at the beginning that this was how they would “clean up” older gen sats.

Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, those are the original / older gen sats, that have way less capacity then the newer models. They are moving away from tons of small sats and more to larger (with longer life time) sats that have multiple times the capacity, of the combined smaller sats. Quoting a older post i made on the subject: ------- Take in account, that a lot of those are replacement sats for the first generations that they are deorbiting…

Deorbiting the v 1.5 has a far lower chance of anything hitting the ground than the bigger ones.

True, but their demising technology appears to be quite good too. I had an interesting discussion at the Small Satellite conference in Utah with folks about demising and they mentioned starlink. "Good" demising has the 'slipstream' layer of the satellite burn up quickly on de-orbit and then the other bits are made purposely non-aerodynamic, especially with fastners which are designed to burn quickly to rapidly disassemble to satellite while it is still quite high so that the smaller pieces will have enough altitude to get to their "full demising" velocity on the way down.

The team I'm working with is just doing a cube sat which has pretty straightforward demising but overall it was interesting to see the thought and strategy that people put into this.

Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#214
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m just a layman, but why can’t they increase the orbital radius to solve this problem? Like, if the current “layer” is too full, have the new satellites orbit further out?

Not with a geostationary orbit. That must have a fixed radius. The problem is that satellites have to move to counteract the force of gravity to avoid falling out of orbit. But if they move too much or too little, then the satellite moves with respect to the earth and the orbit is no longer geostationary. (Caveat: Not an expert by any means, just someone who had a similar question and did some reading, so my answer m…

This has already been addressed as LEO is not geostationary but to point as to why. Consider the earths equator rotates at a particular velocity so there is a particular orbital radius where the two cancel and NO energy is needed to fall around the equator at the same rate the equator is moving. That is a geostationary orbit.

LEO maxes out ~ 1,200 miles radius, geostationary is at little over over 22,000 miles radius.

Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#215
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No conspiracy, but let's say that it is rather hard to get proper benchmarks done by actual users, and one has to rely on a lot of anecdotical data. Have you seen any real-life benchmark reports with traceroutes, measure downtime, handover time etc that impressed you in a positive way? If so, please share. Hawaiian Airlines - very interesting. Sadly wrong side of the planet for me to test it myself :) It very well mi…

"Handover downtimes" for stationary or mobile users? If they're stationary, that's not something inter-satellite links are needed for or would help with.

You are very wrong here:

Right now Starlink claims to be operating a mesh, but they are not. If they would want to build a mesh, Inter-sat links for NOT be used used to pipe through bandwidth to the "best" base station. It would be used for shared state to be able to prepare a handover. Synching state obviously is much easier and more stable if the neighboring sats can talk directly, instead of sharing it over their slow, high latency and lossy base stations.

See IEEE 802.11r for the equivalent for WiFi.

Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP said "scientific advancement has suffered from the light pollution," past tense. Your source explores a "potentially large rise in global sky brightness," and an "expected...rapid rise in night sky brightness." These are not risks to be ignored. But we haven't even observed or quantified them, which is the first step to weighing mitigation options. (Which could be physical, e.g. lowering satellite reflectivity. Or…

This paper shows how in 2023 scientists were already annoyed by this, that they had to accommodate this into their observations, and adjust their measurements accordingly. Suffered (past tense) may be hyperbolic, but it isn’t untrue either. This 2023 paper is also issuing a warning, that if this continues without mitigation, ground based astronomy will be affected. They have the calculations to prove that. What they…

> They have the calculations to prove that

They have calculations that show this is how our models play out.

> What they are particularly concerned about is detecting faint objects inside the radio wave spectrum will be impossible because it will be lost in noise

Could become. They're not talking about mitigation because we haven't observed the problem yet.

> Now 2 years have passed since this paper was published, and we still don’t have mitigations for ground based radio astronomy

Again, where is the "scientific advancement" that "has suffered"?

> seriously doubt we will ever have one

Based on what?!

Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#217
post #134
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current Starlink satellites are 800-970kg[1] and 100% of their mass is vaporized on reentry, so 1-2 satellites a day would be approximately 1.5 tons per day added to the atmosphere. The atmosphere's mass is 5.15 quadrillion tons. Even if satellite vapor stayed in the atmosphere forever, it would take approximately 10,000 years before it reached 1 part per billion. So basically it's not worth worrying about. 1. https:…

Yet? My point is, Starlink is doing this now, but they are continuing to scale up. Other companies are going to follow. Is there a point that this does become something to worry about because the scale has increased?

The highest numbers I can find for the final Starlink constellation is 40,000 satellites. Let's assume Starlink and its competitors have constellations totaling 100,000 satellites, and satellites need to be replaced every five years, and each satellite weighs 1 ton. That means 20,000 tons of vaporized satellites per year. The atmospheric emissions would be 3.88 parts per billion per year. This would still be less than the mass of asteroids and space dust that burn up in the earth's atmosphere every year.

If the reentering satellites were somehow transformed entirely into chlorine gas that somehow stayed in the atmosphere forever, we would reach the OSHA permissible exposure limit of 1ppm after 250 years. Chlorine is detectable by smell at 3ppm, which would take 750 years.

It's very likely that the vast majority of the vaporized satellites are inert, as they are basically incinerated on reentry. It's also likely that most of of the vaporized satellite does not stay in the atmosphere for very long. The only way this could be a problem is if the satellites emit a long-lived compound that catalyzes a reaction in the atmosphere, similar to how CFCs destroy the ozone layer. So far, the only candidate for that is aluminum oxide particles, and solid rocket boosters create more of that than reentering satellites. (Fortunately aluminum oxide isn't nearly as bad for the ozone layer as CFCs, and SpaceX does not use solid boosters.)

Also once you are launching tens of thousands of tons to orbit per year, it starts to become feasible to build infrastructure in space. Satellites at the end of their service life contain valuable raw materials. It would likely become cheaper to refurbish or recycle them rather than deorbit and launch new ones.

Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#218
post #130

This article has a somewhat alarmist tone, but isn't this just Starlink working as intended? It seems much better for an old non-functional Starlink satellite to burn up in the atmosphere instead of continuing in an uncontrolled orbit. I believe most burn-ups are controlled intentional deorbits.

Yep, those are the original / older gen sats, that have way less capacity then the newer models. They are moving away from tons of small sats and more to larger (with longer life time) sats that have multiple times the capacity, of the combined smaller sats. Quoting a older post i made on the subject: ------- Take in account, that a lot of those are replacement sats for the first generations that they are deorbiting…

But if they're adding larger capacity ones that still have the same failure mode, then the "1 to 2 a day" becomes even worse right?

Or are those larger ones also ones that have a longer shelf life?

Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there not concerns with burning up multiple agglomerations of metal, plastics, and ceramics the size of a small car in the upper atmosphere every day?

The deorbits are controlled to occur over nonpopulated areas (i.e. the middle of the ocean). I don't think it amounts to much of a concern, compared to, say, the sum total emissions of all factories, power plants, ships, airplanes, and vehicles.

The deorbits are controlled to occur over nonpopulated areas (i.e. the middle of the ocean). I don't think it amounts to much of a concern, compared to, say, the sum total emissions of all factories, power plants, ships, airplanes, and vehicles.

People used to think the oceans could just slurp up all of our garbage and plastic forever without a problem. Yet, here we are.

Re: One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day

#220
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Handover downtimes" for stationary or mobile users? If they're stationary, that's not something inter-satellite links are needed for or would help with.

You are very wrong here: Right now Starlink claims to be operating a mesh, but they are not. If they would want to build a mesh, Inter-sat links for NOT be used used to pipe through bandwidth to the "best" base station. It would be used for shared state to be able to prepare a handover. Synching state obviously is much easier and more stable if the neighboring sats can talk directly, instead of sharing it over their…

…what? Where do you see the claim that they are running a mesh? Why would they do that?

The main point of inter-satellite links is to provide coverage to areas beyond single-hop (subscriber to satellite to ground station) coverage. (Theoretically they can also be used to provide extremely low latency intercontinental routing, but for most traffic, the goal would be to minimize routing in space.)

Since the entire constellation is known a priori, all paths can be precomputed centrally, just like in a non-moving network, and that routing information can then be propagated to terminals and satellites. There’s no need to dynamically make complex “mesh” routing decisions at the edge.

802.11r controls faster key exchanges in 802.11 roaming scenarios – what’s the relation to satellite ISPs?

It seems like you have some axe to grind with Starlink and are collecting evidence through that lens.

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