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Unexpected solar weather is accelerating satellites' orbital decay

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Re: Unexpected solar weather is accelerating satellites' orbital decay

#31

Post by dr_orpheus »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #8
jaywalk wrote: post #2

Is the word "plummet" really appropriate here? They're talking about falling at a rate of 0.001mph, which is much faster than expected but hardly a "plummet."

Well at that rate, it will crash into the Earth in…never

But it will though. The lowest satellites are at an altitude of 460 km above the Earth. And the decay of the satellite in to the Earth is exponential [0] so the unexpected drop is a significant impact on the lifetime of the spacecraft. You can see from the plot in that Orbital Decay that there is an altitude that it starts dropping very rapidly. So they may have expected it de-orbit in approximately 10 years, but now the de-orbit could be something like 5 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_decay#/media/File:Alti...

Re: Unexpected solar weather is accelerating satellites' orbital decay

#32

Post by perihelions »

jaywalk wrote: post #2

Is the word "plummet" really appropriate here? They're talking about falling at a rate of 0.001mph, which is much faster than expected but hardly a "plummet."

They also say Starlink fully lost 40 satellites to solar weather (were decelerated rapidly enough to burn up in the atmosphere, before their orbits could be rescued). There's a range of outcomes.

Thread about that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30267587 (488 comments)

Re: Unexpected solar weather is accelerating satellites' orbital decay

#33

Post by andrewflnr »

not2b wrote: post #13

Too many HN threads just seem to be people arguing about the appropriateness of the title. The article addresses a significant and interesting issue that's going to have major negative effects on business models, as well as some positive effect on space junk. I think they did a decent job, at least for an article intended for the general public, and I'm glad I read it. And yes, the word "plummet" is an exaggeration.…

Misleading headlines are a constant act of sabotage on our ability to prioritize our information intake. I don't know if it really needs to be discussed every single time, but it is important enough to be recognized and discussed, and until we decide to get serious about rebelling or whatever, well, who's going to decide where the exact appropriate place is to discuss it? So basically as long as it keeps hurting, were going to keep talking about it whenever and wherever it hurts.

Re: Unexpected solar weather is accelerating satellites' orbital decay

#34

Post by zoomablemind »

pempem wrote: post #19
mc32 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, plummet is like straight down till it hits something. Given it's root is in "plumbum" it's not surprising and yes, this is used incorrectly. Not being prescriptive, but this usage is pretty misleading.

Well now that we've determined that plummet maybe isn't the right word to use, shall we discuss the fact that satellites are unexpectedly falling from the sky in yet another climate change that we had not predicted?

> ...shall we discuss the fact that satellites are unexpectedly falling from the sky

Well, the falling is rather expected, it's just the rate of it is faster, than we hoped for.

Maybe in a couple of years, once at max, the rate will start decreasing, but for some cubesats this may be terminal by then.

Re: Unexpected solar weather is accelerating satellites' orbital decay

#35

Post by pempem »

jtbayly wrote: post #27
pempem wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well now that we've determined that plummet maybe isn't the right word to use, shall we discuss the fact that satellites are unexpectedly falling from the sky in yet another climate change that we had not predicted?

If only we hadn't been burning fossil fuels, the sun wouldn't be punishing us like this!

Climate of the sun. ugh. climate of the sun obviously.

Re: Unexpected solar weather is accelerating satellites' orbital decay

#36

Post by topspin »

not2b wrote: post #13

Too many HN threads just seem to be people arguing about the appropriateness of the title. The article addresses a significant and interesting issue that's going to have major negative effects on business models, as well as some positive effect on space junk. I think they did a decent job, at least for an article intended for the general public, and I'm glad I read it. And yes, the word "plummet" is an exaggeration.…

"But that isn't a big deal."

It's clickbait. I appreciate people pointing out clickbait. I think a lot of others do as well; it's why they read the comments on an article before the look at the article.

Had the story been titled "Solar Weather Causes Unexpected Satellite Orbit Decay" or some other non-clickbait thing I'd have read it without looking at comments first. I'm actually interested in solar weather due to its impact on radio. Too bad publishers don't understand that clickbait titles are a serious turn off. Apparently everything must be TMZ.

Re: Unexpected solar weather is accelerating satellites' orbital decay

#37

Post by zoomablemind »

There were some space tech startups planning to provide a kind of tug-service to satellites on the low orbit. Not sure if any viability for this is on the near-future horizon.

Space tugs as a service: https://spacenews.com/space-tugs-as-a-service-in-orbit-servi...

Re: Unexpected solar weather is accelerating satellites' orbital decay

#38

Post by jandrese »

not2b wrote: post #13

Too many HN threads just seem to be people arguing about the appropriateness of the title. The article addresses a significant and interesting issue that's going to have major negative effects on business models, as well as some positive effect on space junk. I think they did a decent job, at least for an article intended for the general public, and I'm glad I read it. And yes, the word "plummet" is an exaggeration.…

Writing a good title is as hard as naming things in code. It's a much harder problem than it seems like it should be, with mutually exclusive interests often creating impossible situations.

But also, people just kind of suck at it.

Re: Unexpected solar weather is accelerating satellites' orbital decay

#39

Post by colechristensen »

jaywalk wrote: post #2

Is the word "plummet" really appropriate here? They're talking about falling at a rate of 0.001mph, which is much faster than expected but hardly a "plummet."

Yes, orbit decay having gone up by a factor of ~10 is indeed plummeting.

You park things in low earth orbit so that they don't stay up forever and indeed come down in reasonably small human-scale timeframes. Usually on the time scale of decades, sometimes more, sometimes less.

If you designed a satellite to stay up for 10 years, it'll suddenly only be able to stay up a year, that's the scale of these things.

Again it's an exponential thing, a seemingly small scale change in the slow part makes the fast part come quite a lot sooner.

Re: Unexpected solar weather is accelerating satellites' orbital decay

#40

Post by kzrdude »

not2b wrote: post #13

Too many HN threads just seem to be people arguing about the appropriateness of the title. The article addresses a significant and interesting issue that's going to have major negative effects on business models, as well as some positive effect on space junk. I think they did a decent job, at least for an article intended for the general public, and I'm glad I read it. And yes, the word "plummet" is an exaggeration.…

I think HN's current title policy is exactly right, for this reason: submissions need "neutral" titles so that we can discuss the content instead.

In this case, the discussion of the word plummet is halfway topical: it's about understanding the severity and going more into detail of what's actually happening, putting it in context. The equivalent discussion would happen regardless of word choice.

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