Tesla’s owner has already successfully launched 2,000 and plans to send another 10,000 into orbit
Not a good time for Elon Musk, Tesla’s billionaire owner. Shares on the stock market are not doing very well, a piece of its Falcon 9 rocket is about to crash into the Moon and 40 of the 49 Starlink satellites it launched last week from the Kennedy Space Center have been hit by a geomagnetic storm and will crash to Earth, disintegrating.
About forty satellites are not many, given that Musk has already successfully launched 2,000 and plans to send another 10,000 into orbit. They will serve to improve internet connections, and we will all be happy to use them. But many scientists did not hide a smirk of satisfaction at the news that the last launch failed 80%: for months they have been saying that Starlink is a crazy project, which will fill the low orbit of the Earth with satellites that will cause refractions that will weaken them. even the darkness of the night.
Musk’s satellites are very small, light in weight, and can be sent into space by the dozen with a single launch. It is precisely their small size that makes them more sensitive to geomagnetic storms caused by the Sun. The solar wind is an uninterrupted flow of particles consisting essentially of protons and electrons that interact with the Earth’s magnetic field, causing the atmosphere to warm and increase. of the density at the “low altitudes” in which the satellites are deployed.
The atmospheric resistance encountered by the Starlinks was 50% higher than previous launches. When the operators at the control center noticed this, they ordered the satellites to position themselves cut off, like a sheet of paper, to offer less resistance, but it was useless. They have overheated, slowed down and will now fall back to Earth, disintegrating upon contact with the denser atmosphere.
The incident won’t slow Musk’s project that much. Astronomers fear that when all of its 12,000 satellites are in place there will be a new constellation that will ruin the night sky and hinder our ability to study the Universe. Josef Aschbacher, head of the European Space Agency, also called for an intervention by the European Union to prevent the American billionaire from “setting the rules” in space, damaging the possibilities of other countries to launch satellites. China has accused the United States of ignoring international treaties after two “close encounters” between the Chinese space station and the Starlink satellites.
Musk’s satellites, according to Starlink, will allow video calls, streaming and other data-intensive activities that are not possible with conventional satellite internet services. They will be able to quickly connect to the web locations not served by terrestrial repeaters and therefore seem a good thing, which will also improve the lives of those who are deciding to go to work remotely from the country house. However, scientists have long warned that solar storms can pose a serious danger to the functioning of satellites in orbit and to our excessive dependence on technology, but no one listens to them. Perhaps we will realize this only when after a great solar flare the computers shut down and we will have to go back to doing divisions and square roots with the pen, having forgotten how to do it.
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